pisco / paracas

Pisco is a small town. We only spent about ten minutes in Pisco proper, walking through Plaza de Armas and through the market. Wade bought a charming monkey wallet. We found a combi bound for Paracas and hopped on board. Every several hundred feet, the combi would stop and a woman would hand over a straw lunch box through the window to the driver-helper-boy (DHB) with some money. The combi held about fifteen people and twenty-five lunches. As we neared Paracas, the combi would stop every few blocks, and the DHB would hop out with a few lunches and drop them at the security gate of buildings. It was a lunch delivery system!! Peru is awesome!

We are headed to the National Reservation of Paracas, which according to the Good Book, contains wild animals and guano (bird shit!! it´s an export!!). We have a quick lunch of bread and cheese and piña Nutri Grain, then walk through the boardwalk and into a neighborhood in the direction we presume to be the Park. A uniformed policeman informs us that it is too far, but we decide he is in cahoots with the taxi driver to his left, and so ignore him.

We walk and walk and walk, through a neighborhood that leads to beautiful beachfront homes. Do Peruvians have money like this? We imagine they may be condos or timeshares, and discuss the possibility of sitting in their lawns to rest. We continue.