Islas Ballestas

November 3^rd, 2021

In Paracas, the most advertised tourist excursion is a two hour boat trip to Islas Ballestas, the Ballestas Islands.  On the weekend, during the Peruvian holiday, there were massive line-ups by the dock, so I avoided it like the plague.  Today was an overcast day to start.  I was in contact with Jose Luis about kite surfing and we both agreed that it would probably take a while for the wind to build.  I also reached out to the paragliding contact that Jose Rosas gave me a few days ago but they weren’t going out flying today either.  The sky cleared and I thought it would be a good afternoon to do the Islas Ballestas trip.

 

Instead of going to one of the many tourist agencies advertising the tour, I figured I’d see if I could buy a ticket right at the pier.  A middle aged lady who was wearing a somewhat official looking tourist guide vest looked promising so I asked her about tickets.  Unfortunately, she didn’t speak any English and my Spanglish is not improving fast enough.  We fumbled through our communication and she claimed that this was the last boat of the afternoon, even though it wasn’t quite 1pm.  The price was 51 soles ($17) and I was quite sure that was the “gringo price” but decided that I didn’t care.  I explained that I hadn’t had lunch yet and she pointed out a small cart with a couple ladies who were selling small chicken and beef bun-wiches.  Turns out one of the ladies was Estrella, the lady from the National Reserve tour a few days ago.  They were 3 soles each ($1) so I grabbed a few of them.

 

Back at the dock, I paid the tour guide for the ticket and then she ran off to get a physical ticket, I gather from one of the tourist agencies.  Seemed odd that they just didn’t sell tickets at the dock, but I guess they want the middleman to take a cut, especially from gringos.  There seemed to be a mad rush to get going and I was asked numerous times by men by the gate where my ticket was and eventually the lady came running back from who knows where with my ticket.  I passed through the turnstile and walked down the covered dock and joined a queue of about 40 people.  I don’t know what the earlier rush was about as we ended up standing around for another 10-15 minutes before boarding the 40’ open motorboat.  We pulled away from the dock for all of 2 minutes and then returned to pick up half a dozen late shows…oh well, I have time, in fact, I had all day.

 

The boat cruised out of Paracas Bay and our first stop was at the Candelabra, which is prehistoric geolglyph (a large design on the ground) on the side a 2-300 meter sandy hill.  There has been pottery found nearby dating back to 200 BC and no one really knows why it was made.  It is about 600 feet tall and can be seen from 20 kilometres away.

 The Candelabra:

Sporting my new sun hat...and the mask does help with not getting sunburnt!

The coastline of the Paracas National Reserve:

Next it was on to the Ballestas Islands that were another 7-8 kilometres away and took about 15 minutes I the boat.  As we approached, you could see hundreds of birds flying around, and then we got the lovely whiff of bird guano.  There’s a lot of guano, a shit ton of bird shit you could say, enough that one of the islands houses half a dozen buildings for collecting and packaging it to be sold as fertilizer.

Approaching the islands:

Spot the penguins:

Double arches!

Being a free flyer (paragliding and hang gliding), I love birds as obviously we are trying to emulate them in our sport.  There were, in no particular order: Belcher’s gulls, Peruvian pelicans, guanay cormorants, red-legged cormorants, Peruvian boobies (who doesn’t like those!) and shockingly Humboldt penguins!  I didn’t expect penguins this far north at 13.7° south, only about 1000 kilometres from the equator but they get their name from the Humboldt current which flows north from the bottom end of South America.  Super cool (literally).

Now spot the pelicans:

Pelicans and penguins:

Part of the guano packing facility:

In the top middle, those are all sacks of guano stacked about 15 feet high...yum.

The darkness on the top half of this island...is thousands of cormorants!

In addition to the birds, we saw some seals sleeping on the rocks and a sea lion striking a bit of a pose.  It is quite a unique set of islands, one of those hot spots for wildlife in the world and it was well worth the visit.  The islands also had many arches, including an arch you could look through on one island all the way through an arch on a distant island.  It made me think of Cabo San Lucas which is all proud and promotes its one arch…not terribly impressive after seeing this spot.

 It's siesta time:

It would have been nice to have been on an English-speaking tour but you gotta take what you can get sometimes.  Instead, I rocked out to my own music and as we were returning to Paracas I enjoyed watching the cormorants dive bombing down to try and find some lunch.  Occasionally the 2-3 foot splash that they created lined up perfectly with a crescendo of a tune.

 

Returning back to Paracas Bay, lots and lots of fishing boats:

That evening's dinner reward.  The challenge here is that almost every meal at every restaurant is seafood.  Tough to find variation when staying here for a week.

It was a super nice afternoon trip.