Alligator steak and bird poo

Hello, Elizabeth here. Greetings from Iquitos in Peru, the largest city in the world inaccessible by road. Sam told me that little nugget this morning, he's very good at these geographical statistics you know. Important food news just in, Sam ate alligator steak last night. He said it was like chewy fish. We have also now sampled alpaca a few times (good, less chewy than llama) guinea pig (disappointingly like chicken, a little more gamey but not amazing) and ceviche (raw fish marinated in lime and ginger, yummy).

Anyway, we left you last in lovely Arequipa, where we spent several days sampling the local cuisine, see above, comiserating with Edward, who was struck down rather cruelly by the aforementioned local cuisine, and generally just mooching about. We did go and see the famous ice mummy of Arequipa, a 12 year old Inca princess who was bashed over the head about 600 years ago and buried in the ice at the top of a volcano in order to appease the volcano god. Poor thing. She is incredibly well-preserved but was only discovered after a recent eruption and is now curled up in a fridge at the museum for tourists and school children to come and gape at.

After Arequipa we headed West to Nazca and took a flight over the famous lines which were made on the pampa outside the town. Nobody knows who they were made by or why, one theory is that the local shamans took hallucinogenic cactus sap and that the lines were a result of their "shamanic flights" or "trips" as they are usually known. Whoever designed them had obviously been to the jungle (a long long long way away) at some point as there are certainly no monkeys or hummingbirds in the desert around Nazca. Either that or they flew there in their minds........ooooooh.............

I was slightly worried that our pilot had had some cactus sap as he laughed like a maniac before we got in our tiny tinpot plane. He returned us safely back to the airstrip however, but only after executing some slightly stomach churning roller coaster-esque manouvres in mid air.

So after spooky mystical Nazca we went to a little town called Paracas a bit further up the coast. Paracas is famous for it's guano, otherwise known as bird poo. Apparently battles were fought over it during the War of the Pacific as it's very valuable stuff (!). They still harvest a lot of it from the Islas Ballestas, just off Paracas, and sell it around the world as fertiliser. So we got a boat out to the islands to do a bit of bird watching and managed to see many many birds, including Humboldt penguins, Peruvian gulls and vast numbers of Peruvian Boobies. Sam said he was a bit disappointed with the Boobies, not quite sure what he was expecting. We also saw our old friends the South American sea lions, roaring and groaning away on one of the little beaches.

After Paracas we headed North once more to Lima, a city of roads, many cars, lots of smog and quite a few shopping malls. Not the most beautiful place we've ever been I have to say but we did only spend two days there so maybe we just didn't see the good bits. We said a sad goodbye to Ed and as he flew off to Manchester we flew off to the jungle. Now we're just waiting for the boat to the border with Brazil and amusing ourselves by eating strange Amazonian delicacies and watching girls dance around on the riverside with their pet snakes. Watch out for the next installment where Sam fights giant anacondas and Liz doesn't sleep for three days on account of giant spider getting under the mosquito net paranoia.