Save The Best To Last

Enjoying our last amazing breakfast at the Casa Andina Hotel in Nazca, having had a brilliant relaxing time here,

we put on our packs for possibly the last time on this trip and walked the four blocks to the bus station.

We hadn’t had a clue how early to get here; for the first journey from Lima we’d boarded the bus half an hour early. So we decided we might as well wait at the bus station than at the hotel, and got there an hour before the bus was due. Which of course, was one hour too early as we didn’t board the bus until a minute before it was due to depart!

Still, at least we passed some time fighting off a guy in the bus depot who was determined he was going to fasten our pack cover straps up! We don’t think he was “all there” and he nearly destroyed our pack covers messing around with them, but we managed to move him away from them before any damage was done!

Getting onto the bus,

and back in our luxury VIP seats,

we settled back for the seven hour journey to Lima.

We got to see a lot more of the landscape on this journey than on the corresponding journey down to Nazca, as we passed through the main areas in daylight rather than in the pitch black. First thing of note as we left Nazca was the observation tower for the Nazca Lines, which we’d only previously seen from the air,

and then we passed mile after mile of desert landscape. We stopped at places such as Paracas

and Ica,

two very dusty towns/cities set right against a backdrop of the Pacific Ocean and large sand dunes.

If we’d been aware of these places before booking the bus back to Lima, we probably would’ve spent a night in at least one of them. But, like some other places on this round the world trip, they entered the “things to do” list for another time.

Unlike the bus ride down to Nazca, which had arrived 45 minutes late, we actually pulled into Lima Bus Terminal half an hour early! So, a very quick cab ride to Miraflores, we checked into our hostel an hour and a half earlier than we’d thought we would.

We’ve been really lucky with our hostels on this trip. Many have turned out to be the best accommodation we have stayed in, beating big chain hotels hands down. We haven’t had a bad experience with any hostel we’d stayed in. So it was slightly ironic that, for our very last place on the trip, we hit possibly one of the worst places we’ve been in on the entire trip!

It is, not to put too fine a point on it, a bit of a dump! It’s supposed to be a newish hostel, yet feels completely tired and worn out, there are dirt marks all over the walls, and its really just a bit crappy in general.

The laughable thing is, there is some award letter in the reception proclaiming it to be “the best hostel in South America for 2007”. I can only think that this is the equivalent of the New York café in the film Elf selling the “best cup of coffee in the world”! Because we’ve stayed in five hostels/ B&B’s in South America before this one, and every single one has beaten it hands down!

But at least it’s cheap (about £12.50 a night for a private room). And the location is right in the middle of everything in Miraflores, which means no major walking for our last hours on the trip.

Being back in Miraflores seems strange. We wish we could’ve ended the trip in the hotel in Nazca, rather than come back to Lima with it’s strange constant cloud cover and humidity. And we feel that the travelling is now over, with the only things left to do being a taxi to the airport and two flights home. But, we’re here for a couple of nights, so after six months on a near constant move we have the strange experience coming of trying to kill time for 48 hours!