2nd September - Lima to Nazca

3am, the click of a lock and the long, slow groan or a door being opened. Motionless, I observed as the locked door beside Zoe's bed slowly opened and a person entered our room. She slowly tip-toed over to the door out of our room and, opening it, left our room. It transpired that there was a smaller room off our room and that the only way out of it was to go via our room. Obviously someone had needed to go to the toilet during the night and, although quiet, had managed to scare to death 6 fresh new arrivals in Peru!

Later in the morning at around 7am, Chris, James and I headed out into Lima to investigate buses to Nazca. Crossing every road was a fresh adventure, but eventually we made it to the closest terminal, Ormeno. James summoned his courage and leapt into a Spanish conversation with the girl on the desk. Coping admirably, he discovered that there were no buses with seats available that morning and that instead we would have to travel in the afternoon. We decided to check the other bus companies. It took a while to find Civa, but eventually (with some more Spanish from James) we located their terminal. They had an earlier bus but we would still arrive in Nazca later than we wanted. The third bus company was some distance away and, although initially offering the earliest bus of the 3 companies, later decided that it was full. We therefore had to return across the city to Civa and book onto the 11am bus. After close to 2 hours of running around, we returned to the Hostel to let the others know that we had got a bus booked.

The Camper Van was readied for our departure and we looked forward to another fine race through the streets of Lima to the bus station. The excitement was slightly too much for Lyndsey, who, in the heat of the moment, forgot to retrieve her pyjama bottoms from her bed before leaving. We zipped around to the bus station and, after figuring out that we had to check-in our luggage for storage in the hold, we stood waiting near the gate for the bus. It arrived late and took a while to load and so we were almost an hour late out of Lima. The journey, however, was fantastic. The suburbs of Lima comprised of a mixture of industry, normal houses and slums, but, once we cleared Lima, each side of the bus had a completely different view: on the left, a vast, flat, empty desert; to the right, the Pacific ocean washing against the beach.

The bus stopped a couple of times. The first time was to try to pick up some passengers and seemed to last an eternity. The second stop was at a restaurant surrounded with a big wall with gates for the buses to get in and out that were closed as soon as the bus had passed through. Throughout the journey, our attention was distracted from the views by the provision of high quality video entertainment. The first video was "Kung Pow - Enter the fist", a hilarious send up of a Chinese martial arts film, including Kung Foo cows. The second video offering was a similarly amusing musical which involved scantily clad woman shaking their thing to some terrible Spanish music (played at some volume throughout the bus). Obvious crowd pleasers.

We arrived in Nazca after dusk. It was suspected that it would be quite difficult to see the Nazca lines in the dark (even using Chris's extra blue torch) and, although the original plan had been to head directly on to Arequipa that night, we decided to stay overnight in Nazca and to see the lines next morning. We checked into the Hotel Alegria, two rooms of 3 people, and then headed down into Nazca for dinner. The guidebook suggested a restaurant which had lots of graffiti on the walls and indeed we spent a lot of the time reading the various comments that previous diners had left. We were also provided with our first free Pisco Sours, an interesting drink with a foamy head that is served in the region and which I (alone) thought was quite pleasant. While we were sitting at the table, a small, hand-bag sized dog trotted past and barked a friendly welcome to our group. This startled Zoe and Lyndsey to the point that they both leapt 6 feet into the air and screamed, a reaction which then provided a good 5 minutes of solid laughter!

After a really lovely meal, the lady came to collect the plates and give us the bill. She was partially to blame for asking James in Spanish if he had enjoyed the meal, but her reaction to the answer "No" from James was a complete scream. There were a couple of seconds of frozen silence before James twigged what had been asked and hastily rectified the situation.

After dinner, Zoe, James and Chris headed down to the bus terminals and checked for buses to Arequipa the next day. They booked onto an Ormeno coach for 3pm next afternoon and then returned to the hotel for some well earned sleep.