After sandboarding in the Desierto de California, outside Paracas, you can honestly say you've been there and dune that, and even celebrate with a pisco sour.
The race is on. Sand pelts my goggles, and the desert wind twists my hair into tumbleweed. I squint into the sun as the driver picks up speed and steers our four-seat buggy toward another dune. It’s the size of Parliament Hill’s Centre Block; climbing up, I worry we’ll flip backward. When we reach the crest, I can see nothing but sky ahead. Then the buggy’s front wheels touch down on the other side of the ridge, and we careen diagonally down a bank so steep, it would be labelled a double-black diamond at a ski resort. I start laughing uncontrollably. This must be what dogs feel when they ride in a car with the windows rolled down.
It’s the second time in as many days that I’m riding this roller coaster in the desert of Paracas, 260 kilometres south of Lima. The shifting dunes – a sepia love letter written by the wind – have apparently cast a (dry) spell on me. (The magic is enhanced when I find out that buried under all the sand is a city built out of gold by the ancient Paracas people.) But their allure could also have something to do with adrenalin. Conquering the summit of another giant sand heap, we stop. The driver shuts off the engine and takes down a sandboard strapped to the buggy’s tubular exoskeleton. He rubs the board’s underside with a candle. “Para más velocidad.” For more speed, he explains and ushers me to a precipice. “You know what to do; you’re Canadian,” he says with a grin. But rather than standing on the board, I plant myself on my stomach. I lower my goggles and push off with my arms like a skeleton racer. My heart does a triple take, and for a moment I forget that the rest of the world exists.
The friendly staff at Hotel Paracas can equip you with a bike or a kayak for solo exploration, or you can ask them to take you out on a catamaran tour of Paracas Bay.
This corner of southwestern Peru is a decompression chamber for stressed and sun-starved souls like me, or the chef and the real estate agent from Lima with whom I shared a round (or two?) of pisco sours at Hotel Paracas the previous night. They told me they always come here, especially on weekends, for the guaranteed glorious weather and good time. Indeed, throngs of Limeños – including 85 percent of the guests at my hotel – descend on the town of Paracas (pop. 1,200) to let loose and work on their tans. And who can blame them? The capital is besieged by fog, la garúa, for almost half of the year. Call them fog birds, which makes this stretch of Peru’s south coast their Florida, complete with five-star hotels and, coming soon, whitewashed condo buildings boasting pools and tennis courts and even a man-made saltwater lagoon.
I’m combing Playa Yumaque in the Paracas National Reserve for a spot where the Pacific lives up to its name. You see, I’ve brought my swimsuit and am eager to dive in; the amiable staff at Hotel Paracas told me when serving my caramelized French toast with mango this morning that the park has ridiculously deserted beaches. (So much for my Florida parallel.) But whoever baptized this ocean obviously didn’t factor in high tides and tall waves. I don’t even dip my toes in the churning swell and am glad I forgot to bring lemons for the scallops I had planned on plucking out of the water.
The Paracas National Reserve is home to a lunar landscape punctuated with archeological sites and empty beaches.
I play land crab and drive around the reserve instead, making my way by a salt lagoon, the harvest of which ends up on dinner tables and icy roads in Canada. The hills are alive with fossils, ancient burial grounds and, above all, a rainbow of hues. I climb up a plum-tinted knoll in the middle of a lunar land-scape (it rains only about five millimetres each year), which is stippled with so many Inukshuk-like markers, it’s as if a busload of compatriots had stopped by. The slopes shift from ochre to rose to coffee, all marked with Earth’s own sweat stains, swirled like chalk lines across the ground. Even the shoreline gets the artist treatment: In the distance, red beaches separate caramel sandstone cliffs from turquoise water.
Exiting the Paracas reserve, I pass a shallow lagoon created by the high tide. A pink ribbon hovers above the water, whose surface has been smashed to shards by the wind. It’s a flock of flamingos, and I curse myself for not having brought my binoculars. But after asking my driver to take me to his favourite beachside eatery, I do get a close-up view. He circles a roundabout adorned with – yes! – a clutch of plastic flamingos (it’s a very Floridian moment). Then he turns toward El Chaco, the wharf where fishermen haul in their daily catch across from hole-in-the-wall shops hawking wool bags, tie-dye T-shirts and fridge magnets. I grab a seat on the shaded patio of Restaurant Bahía and order a Cusqueña beer and fried rockfish. (The couple at the table beside me is drinking Inca Kola, the most ubiquitous pop in the country and, from what I can tell, one of few beverages to outdo the pisco sour in sheer popularity.) While waiting for my meal, I munch on cancha, kidney-bean-size chulpe corn kernels toasted with oil and sprinkled with salt. A man with two pelicans in tow nods to me. “Señorita, una foto, sí?” My plate arrives and, with it, a good excuse to decline.
The seafood shacks along the El Chaco wharf compete for the claim of serving the freshest ceviches and scallops in town.
But I actually do want to take pictures of pelicans – and Humboldt penguins and Peruvian boobies and guanay cormorants too. I just prefer to photograph them in the wild. So I sign up for a tour to the so-called Poor Man’s Galapagos, a 30-minute speedboat ride from the hotel’s private pier. The Ballestas Islands can’t pride themselves on giant tortoises and pink iguanas. But hordes of sea lions congregate here (it must be the eternal sunshine), converting pebble beaches into nurseries. And nowhere else in the world will you find more guano-producing birds, drawing avid birdwatchers and people like me who like to pretend we’re straight out of a Planet Earth episode.
I hold on to my hat as our boat bumps through the waves. Soon screeching trumps the sound of our engine; I imagine that each bird is imploring its neighbour to please shut up so it can have a nap, with the neighbour answering, “No, you shut up.” There are so many feathered friends that when they sway from side to side – or wobble, in the case of the penguins – it looks like their entire rock is moving. And they churn out a supply of fertilizer so rich that even farming in the desert is possible. Indeed, in the 1800s, Peru sold so much guano, mainly to England and France, that the country was able to pay off its entire foreign debt. That’s one crap-load of money.
Before rounding the Paracas Peninsula on our way back to dry land, we make a final stop. Etched into the sandy hill is what looks like an enormous three-armed candlestick. El Candelabro was likely made by the Paracas people some 2,000 years ago by scooping more than one metre out of the Earth’s surface. In this vacation heaven, it’s tempting to think that it was their version of building sandcastles on the beach, but I ask our guide what the 120-metre-long figure represents. “Maybe a cactus,” he says. “The Paracas culture revered a specific type for its hallucinogenic properties. Or it could be the lightning rod of the creator god Viracocha.” Nobody knows.
The local moto-taxis may not be big, but they’re cute.
“This moscatel mosto verde would be wasted if mixed in a drink,” says Jorge Marroquín from behind the bar at Hotel Paracas’s Bar Zarcillo. He pours me half an ounce of the grape brandy – Peru’s national liquor and the base for the pisco sour – and asks me to taste it neat. I swirl my glass and inhale bananas and lemon grass; on the tongue, though, it’s pure grape. It’s unlike any pisco I’ve ever tried (sorry, Chile), perfect for enjoying on its own as a digestif. At one point, the bar manager explains that “pisco” comes from the Quechua word for “bird” but that the liquor got its name from the port city of Pisco, half an hour north of Paracas, from where it used to be shipped. It’s very confusing, perhaps because by the time I sample all eight grape varietals used to distill the booze – four aromatic and four non-aromatic – I feel about as smart as a flamingo.
That doesn’t diminish my thirst for learning, though. I’ve heard that the region is starting to produce premium wines from grapes like malbec, tannat and chenin blanc with the help of winemakers from such countries as France and Chile, so I head out on a research mission. Before reaching the city of Ica, an hour southeast of Paracas, my designated driver veers off the Pan-American Highway onto a bumpy road that seems to lead to nowhere. We brake for seriously free-range chickens, bump alongside Tangüis cotton fields (whose fibres may well make up the polo shirt you’re wearing) and cross a river, where a whole village has taken refuge from the heat, before finally arriving at Viña Tacama. It’s South America’s oldest vineyard and the biggest in the area, a countryside estate where the emphasis is on country. The tasting room displays old farm implements and dusty bottles. Beside the bar hangs a sign that reads, “Si el mar fuera vino, todo el mundo sería marino.” (If the ocean were wine, everybody would be a sailor.) The walls are laden with awards, including a Vinalies d’Argent from France’s Vins du Monde for the delicate Blanco de Blancos and a silver from Seville’s Concurso Internacional de Vinos y Espirituosos for the robust Don Manuel 2007 tannat. I snap up a bottle of the Blanco de Blancos, redolent with pineapple and passion fruit, to take home, where it’s not available, possibly because Peruvian wines are still seen as a bit of an enigma.
It takes a little while along a bumpy road to reach Viña Tacama, but once you try the vineyard’s Blanco de Blancos and other wines on the tasting menu, you’ll see that it’s worth the trip.
But the area’s biggest riddle is the Nazca Lines. Created by the pre-Inca Nazca people in a manner similar to that of El Candelabro, these giant drawings on the ground – including animal motifs and trapezoids with lines measuring up to three kilometres in length – can only be seen from above. I hitch a ride in a Cessna along with five other passengers. As we reach the Nazca plateau, the pilot descends to 500 metres. We fly in over figures representing a whale, a hummingbird and a spider, among other creatures, the pilot making pirouettes around each for a really good view. A monkey stares at something in the distance, its long tail curled up like a pinwheel, and a humanoid figure waves up at me (or maybe that’s a high-five?). For all the unknowns, it’s clear the people who lived here so long ago sure knew how to have fun in the sun.
To let all the mysteries sink in, I go for a dip in the hotel pool, then get dressed for dinner. But before I head to the Ballestas Restaurant, I cozy up at the bar facing the sea and ask for a Paracas Sour, a twist on the classic drink, made with cinnamon-infused pisco and mandarin instead of lime juice. Forcing myself to sip (it’s tempting to down it in one fell swig), I take in the last remnants of the sun tucking in behind the Pacific, well beyond the silhouette of the Paracas Peninsula. I take another mouthful, savouring the sweetness. It’s simply delicious. This I know for a fact.
Write to us: letters@enroutemag.net
Hotel Paracas is the ideal setting for some R&R, Limeño-style: Chill by one of the two pools with a good book, head over to the spa for a Thai massage or bob around Paracas Bay in a catamaran. Don’t miss the famous Sunday brunch at Ballestas Restaurant; we loved the grilled octopus and the seafood ceviche.
51-56-581-333, starwoodhotels.com
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Sunshine State- Paracas via Lima
Air Canada offers the most non-stop service from Canada to Peru with three non-stop flights weekly from Toronto to Lima. From there, Paracas is a three-hour drive down the coast.
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