Hola Amigos!
In the interest of writing a shorter post, I’ve decided to write a post about our weekend! We left Saturday morning for Ica on a 5 hour bus ride (with no bathroom, unfortunately). What was worse than the lack of toilet facilities, however, was the movie selection. Whilst on our merry way to Ica, we had the supreme pleasure (this is sarcasm) of viewing the 2010 film, “Frozen.” Please, friends, do yourselves a favor and don’t ever watch this movie. Allow me a brief diatribe and plot synopsis. Three friends get stuck on a ski lift at a resort, perhaps before some kind of holiday or before it shuts down for a while. Hard to tell exactly, as it was dubbed over in Spanish. So they’re stuck there for several hours and it’s night time, and the one dude is like you know what, I’mma jump from up here. Shockingly (re: sarcasm) he breaks his legs from the fall of like a hundred or fifty or some large amount of feet. So it’s a pretty crappy situation already. But oh wait, plot twist....WOLVES show up out of nowhere and after being onscreen just long enough to terrify errbody watching, they proceed to eat this poor fellow while his friends can do nothing but watch. This was the point where I turned up my iPod and tried to ignore that the movie continued. Sadly, it did, and as the IMDB has informed us, the other guy gets down, tries to escape on snowboard, and is chased down by wolves and also eaten. Finally at the end, the girl manages to get off the ski lift and down the mountain and get rescued. Unfortunately, her two best friends have now been eaten and she’s all frostbitten and understandably quite upset. End of movie. WHAT KIND OF MOVIE IS THAT? What are we supposed to take away from it? The tagline is one of my favorite parts: “With 30 million skiers and snowboarders in the US and over 5000 chairlifts in operation, it’s only a matter of time before someone gets left behind.” Not only is it the longest tagline I’ve ever seen, it’s not particularly statistically compelling and they don’t cite ANY sources. It was not an auspicious start to our journey, but luckily our weekend was approximately ten million thousand times better than this movie. How it has achieved it’s 6.3 rating I will never know.
On to happier, sunnier, less wolf-y things...Ica! We showed up and managed to find a hostel fairly quickly that was comfortable and cheap. We walked around for a bit and looked into tours, and booked our tour of the Ballestas Islands and Paracas National Reserve for the next morning. Then we headed to the oasis in the middle of the desert- Huacachina! Huacachina is a lagoon that was originally fed by subterranean sources which are now supplemented by well water. It’s surrounded by palm trees and restaurants/hostels, which are then surrounded everywhere that you can see by sand dunes and desert. Super cool. The main attractions are dune buggies, sand boarding, and hanging out by the lagoon. We tried out sandboarding and subsequently became more covered in sand than any other people there, but it was fun. We went swimming in the lagoon, hung out for the day, and had dinner there where we had a server named Julius who was slightly terrifying (although less scary than how bad “Frozen” is).
The next morning we woke up super early to head out on our tour! It turned out that booking a tour actually meant that we had paid to have a private escort for the day, who drove us and a third woman around in his car and basically walked us through every aspect of the day. We told him we were interested in trying some Pisco, and he even set up a little tasting for us in between the islands and the reserve! It was pretty awesome. The pictures illustrate it best but it was truly incredible. The Ballestas Islands are covered in birds, including pelicans, cormorants and Humboldt PENGUINS, as well as sea lions! It was SO cool. There are a number of endangered species there, as well as many species endemic to Peru. The Paracas National Reserve was also incredibly, and is a huge reserve of desert and ocean to protect an incredible number of species. The landscape is also mind-boggling- it is literally the driest, emptiest-looking desert you can imagine on one side, and beautiful cliffs and ocean on the other. The two zones interact in numerous ways, such as lizards eating washed up sea plants and then being eaten by foxes that live in the desert. The museum at the reserve was really cool, and contained tons of information about the creation of the reserve and the biodiversity that is present in Peru. Fun fact: Peru is one of the countries that the UN has designated as “Megadiverse,” meaning that it and 16 other countries contain the majority of the world’s species and should be priorities for preservation. Check it out!
We returned fairly late in the day, and in my case, fairly pink as well (I applied sunscreen 3 times but this apparently did not suffice). We walked around Ica some more looking for things to do but there were no evening tours and it was a Sunday evening so museums were closed. We headed back to the hostel and were delighted to find that “Camp Rock” was on television, with Spanish dubbing. I would not recommend this movie in English, but I feel that the Spanish voice overs enhanced our viewing experience quite a bit. If you have never watched Camp Rock, it’s like Highschool Musical meets The Little Mermaid meets Mean Girls but at a camp, and I do not feel that acting ability was taken into consideration for casting. It is, however, a timeless tale of heterosexual teenage love and finding yourself through music. If you watch it, watch it in Spanish.
That’s all for this post, plus some photos! Talk to you all soon!
Love,
Cassie
The lagoon in the middle of the desert!
The crazy sand dunes
Staring pensively out over the desert (actually, I'm just exhausted from climbing that thing!)
We're excited to be in a boat on the Pacific Ocean!
The Ballestas Islands!
Sea lion! A lil female
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