I´ve left Lima behind, but I´m still in the desert! I visited a small town called Paracas from where I took a boat to some islands called Islas Ballestas. They are also sometimes known by backpackers as "The Poor Man´s Galapagos" Well I thought they were great. I´m sweating buckets but I´m looking at penguins! Right alongside the coast of Peru, the water is very cold because of a current from Antartica. Further away from the coast, it gets warm again, but this means the islands are home to lots of sea creatures from the Antartic.

The islands are home to thousands and thousands of sea birds:

Can you see the penguins, in amoung the pelicans, boobies, cormorants, gulls, ganets... I think you can see all in this photo:

Also some very smelly, very very noisy sea lions, with hundreds of one month old pups/cubs (?) :

The photos on the blog don´t do the animals justice, enlarge them if you can/want! Oh and here´s one of me on a cliff (to be mentioned again later):

Then I had to go to the town of Pisco to go to the bank. I had planned to avoid it, but needs must. The town was distroyed by an earthquake last August ´07. The quake was 7.9 and lasted for 3 and 1/2 minutes. Pisco was flattened and when I was there, I don´t think it had changed much. People were living in tents where their houses had been. There were big piles of rubble in the streets. The kind of thing you see on TV. I didn´t feel right taking any photos but here is/was a restaurant in Paracas, which was also effect, but not as much as Pisco.

Some of the cliff I was standing on above slid into the sea during the quake and caused a small tidal wave that flooded the costal towns. I don´t know if it made the news back home, but it was a big one!

Well, on from Pisco, I headed to Nasca where I am now. This morning I took a tiny winy plane to fly over the desert and view the "Nasca Lines" These were created by the pre Inca people (the Nascas) over 2500 years ago. They removed the top dark layer of sand to reveal the lighter sand and created enormous images of animals and very long straight lines. The strange thing is, you can´t make them out from the ground. If you are standing beside one of the images, you wouldn´t know. They can only be seen from the air. But the Nasca people were long long before the Write Brothers!!

(Simon, can you flip this one)

This is a humming bird, I need to crop the photo a bit but I think you can still make it out: (Simon, maybe you could crop it?)

I´ve lots more photos but you get the idea! I also visited a 1000 year old cemerty. Grave robbers stole from the graves and left the mummies exposed to the elements. So today all that is left are the bones and freakily the hair: (flip please)That´s all for now. I´ve met back up with my Danish friends Lykke and Andes and we are leaving the desert tonight, by luxary bus... Woohoo!

xx r