paracas, peru

As it’s starting to get summer here now, we followed the invitation of a friend to go camping to Paracas for a weekend.
School ended on Wednesday, after a workshop day and two parties, and so Kato and I went to Lima on Thursday night. We arrived early in the morning, and went then to get breakfast close to a friend’s house. Unfortunately the McDonald’s only opened at 8, so we had some time to kill, which we spent hanging around in the parking lot between all our stuff.
After breakfast we woke Miguel up, so we could leave our bags at his house and spend the day in Miraflores and Barranco. Miguel decided to come with us, and our first stop was the Chocolate museum in Miraflores – some friends had  told me about it, and we all agreed that it’s a must-see.  It is a very small, cute museum, and you get a free tour where they give you some infos about cocoa and the process of making chocolate. But the best part was definitely the little museum shop and all the free samples you get to try.
After that we separated, and Kato and I did a little bit of shopping, before we took a bus to Barranco, another nice part of Lima which is also a little quieter.
There we went to the beach, ate our lunch, and waited for Miguel to get off from work. He picked us up, we had dinner together at his house, and even though we were more than tired, we went to this cool bar again, where I’d already been once before.
There we met some other people, and also Maria and her boyfriend had arrived in Lima by then.
On the next day we had to get up very early, and then left straight for Paracas, which is a 3-4 hour drive.
Paracas is a little town, not only in the desert but also in a bay. It has lots of nice and expensive houses and most of them are just used for vacations. Close to Paracas is the entrance to the “National Reserve of Paracas”, where we went to set up our camp – off the road, right at the beach and in the middle of the desert. We were quite a bunch of people, and after we put up out tents and stuff, we started with our “windsurfing lessons”. Some of the girls there were not only pretty good windsurfers themselves, but also teachers. In the beginning I didn’t really want to try, since I’d never been on a surfboard before, but I convinced myself to try it and I was really glad I did. It was a lot easier than I expected it to be, and a lot of fun. Unfortunately the wind got pretty strong early in the afternoon, and so no one really felt like going into the water anymore. So we just hung out at the beach, went back to Paracas to the store, and in the evening we grilled.
Still, I was very tired, so I didn’t stay up too late and went to my “bed” in the back of Miguel’s car soon.
In the morning I woke up early, because the car felt like an oven, and went for a little walk along the water. It looked like a great day, and it was really hot. We went swimming, and windsurfing again, and I just spend all the time in the sun (which paid back with a nice, little sunburn). This day the windsurfing was a little harder because we had a bigger sail and the wind was stronger, and so it was really exhausting. But I was still happy we got the opportunity to try it J
We packed our stuff in the afternoon, and before we left for Lima, Ale and Miguel took us to another bay, way off road through the desert. It was an amazing spot, and we just sat there and enjoyed the view for a while, while some of the guys got on their surfboards again and did some “wave-windsurfing” – looks pretty awesome.
But then it was time to go back, and after dropping Maria and her boyfriend off in Paracas, we started out journey back to Lima.
There we had pizza, watched a movie and spent one more night at Miguel’s house, before I went back to Huaraz on Monday and Kato left for Cusco.