Hello everyone!
We now find ourselves in Lima, Peru after a couple of long bus trips from Cusco to Nazca and from Nasca to here. In just about 1 hour we will be continuing along our way up to Trujilo, Peru where we will be staying for 2 nights before heading on to Ecuador. Even though at this point in our trip we are going to be moving quite frequently, we would like to enlighten you regarding one of our trips in particular, which was the 15 hour bus ride from Cusco to Nazca.
We had woken up that morning after coming back late the night before from climbing Machu Picchu. We were both still a little sore but excited to keep going and continue along the way to our next destination: Nazca. We got the bus station in the early afternoon and left on our bus at around 1:30pm. One thing that we didn´t know however, about this trip is that the roads would be winding back and forth, at a very continuous rate, which in effect makes the stomach also move back and forth at a very continuous rate. With this in effect, Nathan spent about 2 hours in the bathroom praying that we would make it back on a straight road for at least 5 minutes out of the trip.
Finally making it to Nazca, we pulled in at about 5am after spending most of the night bus awake with a person right behind us that was snoring. Getting into the bus station, we decided to let down our packs and take a quick 1 or 2 hour nap before heading out onto the streets. Originally, we had intended to look into getting a flight to go over the Nazca lines while we were there, but with a lot of reports of people dying on planes that had gone down over only the past 3 weeks, we decided to try a different adventurous option: Sand boarding.
We had seen sandboarding done before when we were travelling to some of the costal cities in Brazil and were thinkging that it would be pretty comparative so we decided to save a little money and our safety and go that road instead. Heading out early, we got to the foot of a mountain in the Andes at about 8am. Looking around, all we could see for miles and miles were mountains and deserts. There was no sign of civilization except for the two of us, and our guide (the car the dropped us off left and said he would meet us in about 5 or 6 hours) It was at this point that the both of us were really starting to rethink this decision that we had made as we looked around and realized that there weren´t any sand dunes around except one really massive one in the distance. When asking our guide where we were going (our spanish speaking guide), he just pointed to the sand dune in the distance and said: there.
So we set off…1 hour, 2 hours, 3 hours, 4 hours….through this desert and mountainous wasteland before finally reaching it to the top of that sand dune. Since we had thought the experience would be a little different than it was, we were very unprepared as we only had one orange to eat as we wandered through this hot and barren desert. When we reached the top, we looked at each other, and realized that we were going to need to descend as fast as possible: sunburnt, chapped lips, hungry, thirsty, and shoes full of sand. As we strapped into our boards, we proceeded to try to go down this massive cliffs of sand and get into this new experience. After making it down a couple runs and faceplanting on some others, we found ourselves at the bottom about 20 minutes later just caked with sand in almost every part of our body.
From there, we continued to walk the 40 minutes back to the road from where we had decended and where our driver was supposed to pick us up. We got back to the bus station we little time left before it´s departure and just enough time to grab a quick bite to eat, a gatorade (for electrolites), and dump the mounds of sand out of our pockets before getting on the bus to Lima….lets just say that the shower and nice bed were a good treat after the 7 hour bus ride.
Thus, we press on! Please continue to pray for us as we have been averaging about 6 hours of hiking per day (sometimes intentional and sometimes not). Pray that our legs hold up and that we are able to have the energy to press on. The Lord certainly has blest us in many ways along the trip so far, and we look forward to how the Lord will continue to walk before us and show His faithfulness as we carry on.
Only Jesus,
Nathan and Jon
