Day 349 Thursday 20 March Huacachina to Puquio 321km

Last night we went for a walk around the little lake at the centre of the Oasis and found a restaurant and had dinner. There is lots of Back Packers and young kids that comes here. It feels similar to Cappadocia in Turkey, but this oasis has far less to offer and is much much smaller.

This morning some of us went and climbed the dune, some overslept and some tried to sort out their lives and re-pack their bikes, bags etc.

After breakfast we continued on the Pan American Highway, sharing the now single lane road with hundreds of trucks, Tuk-Tuks, and scooters. It was hard going as overtaking was very difficult due to the amount of on-coming traffic, but we fought along for at least half an hour and then we were on a straight desert road, super ugly, but progress was at least much faster as it was easy to overtake the trucks because of the straight road.

Every 50 kilometer there was a little shop selling cool drinks and next to it was a tyre repair shop to fix tires on all the hundreds of trucks that uses this main road.

We continued in the desert until we came to Nazca, there we went to the airport and had ourselves weighed, jumped onto two planes and went to see the Nazca Lines. These famous lines were made by tribes pre dating the Incas, looooooooong before the Egyptians built the pyramids. No one really know why they built it, but there are lots of theories that they were communicating with the Space Men who were visiting Earth in those days.

After the flight we rode into Nazca and had lunch next to the road, once again we shared three plates of food and tried not to look at the shack’s kitchen from where the food was being prepared by a very old lady.

Above is the old lady that cooks the food and below in the basket is a new puppy, getting used to the corner where he will spend the rest of his life, which may be a long life or short one, depending on how clever it is.

After lunch we turned off the Pan American Highway and started climbing into the mountains. Soon the desert was left behind and the color changed from brown and dusty to green and moist.

But as we climbed higher we could see the mist above us and a while later we were riding with very little visibility, and we knew it was only trucks coming from ahead, so it was slow going, lots of concentration and sometimes lots of times behind a truck until the fog broke for a few seconds allowing us to see when it was safe to pass. Eventually we went over the summit and on the way down the rain caught us. We were lucky to have missed the biggest part of the storm and there was lots of hail lying knee deep at places next to the road. We were wet and cold and stopped at this “coffee shop.”