So, it is time for me to write something, as it would be seen that only Szabi is travelling, and I left myself in the locker room of a hostel.

After Lima, we went to Ica, a town in the desert, or at least next to it. I will not bore you with the description of the journey to get there. All I have to say is, that here, if your bus travels for longer than 4 hours, you get a sandwich and a drink, which is quite good, and should be introduced in Hungary as well.

At Ica we stationed at a very nice and very new hostel, which got its licence only 19 days before our arrival. As you could see in Szabi's blog post, it is guarded by a Statue of the Archangel Michel. We have been told that his protection does not reach out much further than the hostel, and so we shall be aware of our belongings all the time, while wondering in the town. We took a walk out in the sunset to experience the common knowledge that in deserts the nights are very cold. Since I dont want to basicly rewrite what Szabolcs has written, lets skip a bit, where we went out to an oasis, done a sand buggy ride into the very dirty desert, and did some sandboarding. Pics in Szabi's post.

The afternoon we took the bus to Nazca, where we planned to see the famous Nazca Lines. We booked our overflight in Lima already, so we just needed to get to the airport. As we hailed a taxi, and Szabi explained where we want to go, it all seemed soo easy for me. We get there, we take off with a Cessna, and all will be well. It went wrong the very morning, when I had some difficulties in the waste disposal area of human beings. The line of events got more interesting when even the taxi driver missed the entrance of the airport. Luckily we met a guard from the company of our booked oveflight and he arranged us a transport to the public gates of the aviation facilities. The second wave of internal tremors got me when we were waiting for our flight. The toilets at hand, it was of no real concern. After one and a half hours of waiting we were finally alowed through the gates, into the boarding area (real airport security, with x-rays and such), and soon we were taking pictures of a Cessna 207, a mighty machine of considerable shaking power. But that did not frighten us, as we have not consumed any food for breakfast.
As we, along with two pilots and 3 other tourists, took off, something inside me went PING. By the time we reached the first of the signs, (the whale), I was suffering nausea. I could have lived with that, but as we approached the Astronaut, the final waves of bad digestion emerged inside of me, and from basicly the 10th minute of a 30mins flight I was holding my breath and concentrated hard to be able to hold something else inside than my breath as well. As soon as we had landed I catapulted myself towards the toilet.
The afternoon we spent playing Indiana Jones, as we took a guided tour to the stone desert, where an italian-architect-who-became-a-self-trained-archeologist keeps diggin up the old city of Cahuachi. The city is estimated to be 2400 years old, and was supposedly the center of the Nazca civilizaton, and was a holy site to all the following others, as it was said to be a home of an oracle. The city had 36 pyramids, and in the past 25 years, only one of them has been digged up. Imagine... They say that the city covered around 24 square kms.

On the way to Cahuachi we rode past some ancient nazca cemeteries, which had been desecrated by graverobbers and thus the bones and all the other remains of the olden ones lay on the bare earth. It does look like cheap "b" grade horror movie scenery from the distance but at close, it is real. REAL, like, realy REAL. Bits of hair flying around, coloured textiles drying in the unforgiving sun, and bones, white as snow, fractured and intact in heaps. It was a sensation of time travel as I touched a fabric 2000 years old, and looked into the eyeholes of the people who made it. We collected some of the broken pottery, beautifully painted, but I assume we may have to hand them back to a person of authority at the airport.

At 10pm we boarded a bus to Arequipa, the White City, which has no squares named Plaza de Armas. This is quite unique, as all other towns in Peru have their main squares named Plaza de Armas.

The bus arrived at 8am, and we quickly went into our hostel, as I was realy not feeling well by that time, having high fever and other things which makes travelling fun and enjoyable. The most appealing thing of the hostel that time was that 1. it has many many bathrooms, 2. it also has laundry service. We quicky emptied our backpacks and handed the rather smelly plastic bags to the lady behind the reception desk. By 7pm, our clothes arrived, ironed, smelling of flowers, and most of all: clean. I had to take a nap at noon, but Szabi, the brave explorer, went out to take a walk under the burning sun. By nightfall I got better, so I could join him in the quest finding a vegetarian restaurant which was spotted by him earlier that day. Our efforts were futile, but it turned out to be the better, as usual, since after an hour or so, he gave up his dream eating some vegetarian food and we went into an establishment serving one type of food: "1/4 Pollo, papas fritas, ensalada" "1/2 Pollo, papas fritas, ensalada", "1 pollo, papas fritas, ensalada". In one world: chicken. If you have ever seen mass produced grilled chicken, this is it. In the roughly one hour we spent there, I estimate around 30-50 chickens were served to the public, in the most leisure way, and in an environment that I bet all of the European public health authorities would have closed in a blink of an eye. But, based on Szabolcs' information, it tasted good. He sure consumed the 1/4 portion quite quickly. Since I am on a 0kcal diet, I watched the volleyball game instead, which was shown on the TV. It was women, Peru vs. Brazil, and when we left it was even, 2:2. We peaked into another restaurant later and Peru had the lead with 9:3. I hope they won.
Arequipa itself is realy beautiful, I do recommend to visit this city if you can. The main square is dominated by the cathedral, which runs along the whole northern(?) side of the square. The reason for this is, that the church's main hall is paralell to the square. I have never seen a church positioned like this before.

We also visited the Monastery of Santa Catalina, where rich families had their 2nd daughters become nuns. Nuns with servants, personal flat or apartements, and who know what else. The monastery is quite big, and has streets inside, named after spanish cities like Toledo. I took a picture of one of the furnitures, which in I developed a particular interest in the late three days.

Arequipa is also the home of the Ice Princess Juanita, so it was good manners to pay her a visit and leave our visiting cards there as well. Sadly, she is in deep freeze, so we could not talk to her personaly, but I think she still appreciated our presence. The Misstress is in a good shape, so I assume the next 500 years just like the past 500 will leave no mark on her.
And to crown our day, we managed to find the vegetarian restaurant, so all was well.

Another interesting thing about this city, is that the garbage trucks play classical music as a sign of their comings. I was wondering early in the morning, why and what plays Vivaldi's Summer... A garbage truck.

There are quite a lot of things I wanted to write about, for example the traffic in Lima, the different food we tried out, about Peru in general, or at least about what we heard from the different peruvians. Life is ever changing, and this has changed too.
Adam out.