Our new friends had told us about Peru Hop so we looked into it and decided it sounded like great fun. It’s basically a bus line that takes you on a route from Lima to Cusco with stops at some of the coolest places to see along the way. The whole route only costs $200 per person, which is probably more than double the cost if we had booked the bus tickets on a piecemeal basis, but it was well worth it because we got to know some really great people and it took the hassle of planning out of it. They call it Peru Hop because you can hop on and hop off all along the route so you can stay as long as you want in different towns. You can schedule tours and go explore on your own as much as you want and then just get back on the bus when you’re ready to move on.

Oh my gosh it was so much fun! The first leg of the journey was a trip through a dry, arid area of Peru along the coast to a small beach town called Paracas. We got to see the place where they say the desert meets the sea.

On the way to Paracas we saw some huge chicken farms, orchards, vinyards and a cactus farm too. The cactus farm was the most interesting. We asked the Peru Hop guide what the cactus were used for and he told us that they’re actually grown so that a particular type of bug could be harvested off of them. The bugs are then crushed to make red dye for make-up companies to use for red lipstick and food companies to use as red food dye! We also passed by a Coca-Cola plant in Pucusana 😁.

Paracas was a nice little beach town. We ate ceviche for dinner at a restaurant on the ocean. There was a nice young guy from our bus who was eating by himself so we asked him to join us. He had just finished college at West Point and was getting ready to begin his service as an officer in the army. He was a really nice kid 😊.

We spent the night at a hostel in Paracas and the next morning we went on a boat tour of the Ballestas Islands. The Ballestas Islands are sometimes called the poor man’s Galapagos because they have some of the same wildlife (birds, sea lions and penguins) but are way easier to get to. They really are cool and do have some cool animals, but they’re nowhere near as awesome as the Galapagos Islands. Aaren and I went to the Galapagos in 2008 and they are so amazing! There’s an album of pictures from that trip on my FB page if anyone is interested 😊.

There’s a really funny and interesting story about a war they had over the bird poo on the Ballestas Islands 😂! Here is a copy of the page about it from my Lonely Planet travel guide book on Peru:

Here are some pictures and videos from our boat tour: