[Guys, this is the first part of the travel post that I promised, written as though I am 12 years old and my homework was to write about my trip to Peru. I'm chopping it up into parts because pictures take up a lot of blog space, and I also ramble a whole lot of shit. Sorry if you think travel posts are a load of arse. Just pretend I didn't post it and go back to the one about the old people Getting It On.]

Getting there was a right royal pain in the arse. Brisbane to LA, LA to Miami, Miami to Lima. I thought it would never bloody end. The meals ranged from ok on the first flight, to chunks of gristle and fat in gravy on the last. Yes, American Airlines. You have excelled. From LA to Miami, we were mildly interested to discover that we were queueing for the plane behind Stifler's Mom.



Woah! Semi-famous! Um.

Lima is full of restaurants and tattoo parlours. When you walk down the main street, people will yell at you in broken English, requesting that you purchase their goods and get a tattoo. I really can't help but wonder what sort of person would get a tattoo in Lima, just because somebody yelled at them.

Peruvian: HELLO! Would you like tattoo? WOULD YOU LIKE TATTOO?
Tourist: Oh, alright then.

The policemen and policewomen wear extremely tight pants. As well as this interesting feature, Lima has this rather nice building with an assault vehicle parked outside.



It never rains there, and when you get out of the shower and take a couple of steps, you discover that your feet are black, because there's a layer of dirt on everything. Turns out that rain is most excellent for keeping the dirt at bay. Hooray for rain!

Peru is the land of half-finished buildings. It is also the land of historical ruins, and we joked that maybe they took their building inspiration from their ruins, but this is in terrible taste because they are poor and all that.



The tour commenced and we met our fellow travel buddies. They were quite ace. Our tour was led by a happy chappy who was amused by my obscene playing cards, and a melancholy-looking chap who taught us about life, the universe and everything, including the following nugget of wisdom:

"If you look at nature, females are always chasing the alpha male. It is the same with this tour guide business. Being a tour guide automatically makes you the alpha male, and it is natural that a girl would want your spunk up them."

Oh. Teach us, wise one.

Our most excellent bus took us out into the desert. There was a lot of desert. There was desert and some little house things.



There was desert and a beach.



There was desert and a valley.



Plus, we went hurtling over the sand dunes in this:



and all got our fair share of sand in our pants. Damn you, sand!

We spent the night in Pisco, which was completely forgettable because we checked in when it was getting dark, drank beer on the roof with the cats, and checked out the next morning shortly after dawn. But mainly because of the beer. It is known for:

• Having cats on the roof of one of its hotels
• Sharing its name with the most famous drink in Peru, the Pisco Sour (topped with eggy goodness), and
• Being the place where I first started spraying my insides out of whichever orifice volunteered first
  

What did I do with my exceedingly queasy stomach the very next day? That's right, I took a jet boat out on the ocean to look at the Ballestas Islands, and then jumped in a light airplane and flew over the Nazca Lines. If you scooped out my stomach, stuck it in a blender, took it out and jumped on a few times, threw it up into a ceiling fan on high speed and then put it back in my body, it would've been less shaken up than it actually was by the end of that day. No dirtyhands gastro bullshit was going to spoil my holiday, damn it.

I am going to skip out on the pictures of the sea lions and the pingus, because you have all seen them before, but listening to a whole frigging colony (colony?) of sea lions collectively roaring and wailing is something to be experienced. You would not want to be inviting them around to your house for tea. They are really noisy shits. The pingus, on the other hand, were very quiet which was disappointing as I was hoping they would get their groove on and sing songs, like they do in that movie.

When your pilot, who is taking you over the Nazca Lines, decides to take his hands off the steering wheel to point at things, you get a little scared. When he accidentally bumps the steering wheel, making the plane lurch violently in the air, you shit your pants a bit. You're already shitting your pants from the gastro, so you do a bit of a pee instead. By the sixth or seventh bump of the steering wheel, you are starting to get used to it.



Here's a picture of the ground. Oh wait, there's a spacedude engraved there too. To have any chance of actually seeing the lines the pictures need to be a whole lot bigger than the Friendly Blogger Folk allow, so I've put a couple elsewhere. The one they call the hummingbird is here, and the one with the name I can't remember is here. That second one is next to a road so you can sort of get the scale of the bastards. That's if you manage to spot them. Trust me, it's tougher when you're trying not to hurl.

Coming in Part Two: Spiteful condors, watching people order a beer with a side order of cocaine, and getting up close and personal with our llama friends. Ooh, baby.