August 18th Lima to Nazca Day 15
On The Road at last!
Up early and breakfast at 6:30 on another dull Lima morning. Today we start our fieldwork! Checked out of the Sheraton.
First, after loading up, Uisdean & I drove to Eric’s house in SWB Land Rover. Picked up Eric plus luggage and other bits, then drove to IPEN where we collected the LWB Land Rover plus Oscar (IPEN representative who would accompany us throughout the work) and a driver (Jun, who stayed with us also throughout). Everything was ready by 9:00, so we set off.
Our initial journey was southbound from Lima to Ica (see map below) with Jun driving one Land Rover and Eric the other one (The SWB I think) along the ‘Panamerican Highway’, a fairly decent road even then. A rapid change of scenery from some vegetation and somewhat barren landscape as we left Lima, to real desert on our left hand side within a couple of hours. As we left Lima I spotted an example of local ‘cheap’ transport – a lorry, this sort of sight became very familiar during our travels. Local women typically with their ‘blanket’ (‘aguayo‘) full of their possessions over their back, again a typical sight, on their way to get into the lorry.
On the way to Ica we passed Pisco (the famous Peruvian drink ‘Pisco Sour‘, of which I had quite a few, named after this place!) which has vineyards nearby, and is known for wines from the area.
There was always rising land on our left, but close to Ica it flattened out sand dunes were evident.
We had a lunch stop in Ica and a chance to look around a bit into the main square. There was a fairground in action nearby. We took a brief trip out to the Huacachina Oasis and I managed to take a few photos, a distant view with dunes, and of the actual pool and rather beautiful nearby buildings. Since even then it was known as a tourist spot, there were street photographers around the oasis and as with those in Lima, they would take black and white photos processed on the spot with chemicals usually in bottles attached to their tripods..
We carried on out of Ica along the ‘Pan American’ road towards Nazca. I managed a last photo on the way out of town – you can just see the last dune on the left. We then drove through the small town of Palpa, where I managed to take a couple of photos of the streets as we went through.
Land Rovers consume a lot of petrol, so even though we had set off with full tanks, by the time we had gone through Palpa along the road with a rather dry landscape, with trees and mountains in the distance off to the left, we had to to fill up at a ‘PetroPeru‘ gas station (I’m not sure of the location, but before we started climbing up from the coast)
After refuelling we were climbing away from the coast. Now the scenery was more just barren, with the very occasional patch of scrub, and interesting geological features. So desolate was the landscape that we just had to stop and take a few photos. From some points you could the valleys below with vegetation and farming.
Our next stop was to see the ‘Nazca Lines‘ – having seen photos before arriving in Peru, mostly from the air I was looking forward to seeing them. However, at that time the only way to see them in that area was from a small mound just off the main road (see marker on map to the right). So it was a rather disappointing, but yet momentous moment, when we all climbed up and viewed what we could see. Despite the rather limited view, they were still impressive, and I’m glad I had the opportunity to see them. The photos, as usual, don’t really do justice to the views. More photos are on the photos page for August 15th.
Once we’d all spent a bit of time looking at what we could see of the lines, we set off for Nazca itself.
We weren’t far from Nazca, where we found a hotel (I don’t have a note of the name, but may have been destroyed in the 1996 earthquake in any case). At the hotel I was a banana tree in flower for the first time – quite an unexpected sight. The only photo I have of the hotel (taken the next morning) is of the small pool in the central area of the buildings, so it must have been a reasonably good hotel.
Over 400 km of drive today – mostly on tarmac roads
Last Updated on 19/09/2026″