I am hesitant to even write about these next two places because it was mostly a series of unfortunate events, but for the sake of keeping things up to date we’ll briefly rehash the unfortunate happenings.

Our first stop was Huacachina… I know this destination sits high on many people’s best of Peru lists, and it is definitely a cool place to see – an oasis surrounded completely by sand dunes – unfortunately we found this place to be a little disappointing. Not to mention, I might as well have been cruising around town with a giant RIP US OFF! sign taped to my back. At every juncture there was someone trying to get more than what was bargained for; restaurants, the hostel, dune buggy drivers. All trying to charge us for things we never received nor asked for and all done completely unapologetically. In our entire time traveling, we have never been treated so poorly. On the bright side, we did have wonderful sunshine, discovered maracuya pisco sours, watched the sunset over the dunes, and made the most redneck dinner I’ve ever had (see below).

After one glorious and one hellacious day, we decided it was time to high-tail it out of Huacachina and head towards the coast to Paracas. We heard the thing to do there was the Ballestas Island tour so we booked a tour that included our transportation into Paracas. It was a bargain, we didn’t get ripped off, and the tour was ok, but nothing mind blowing. We saw a few penguins, lots of sea lions, a bunch of birds, and several boatfuls of tourists in bright orange life vests fumbling around for the perfect photograph. After snapping a few good photos ourselves, we headed back to shore with all the other sightseers.

We checked in to our hostel which ended up being very nice. It had lots of cool graffiti, nice rooms, a pool, and was right on the beach even though the beach was kind of a wasteland. We spent the afternoon exploring what there was to see of town and headed to the fish market to pick up some fresh fixings for ceviche. We spent the evening eating and drinking beers only to wake up to a very sick Julie. The following day was spent at the infirmary where Julie was treated for food poisoning. So we spent the next couple days recouping on the couch, watching CSI, and sustaining off gatorade and crackers. Another unfortunate event, but we felt that things could only improve from here so we booked our tickets to Trujillo and were excited for the next leg of our trip!