So our trip to Nazca was a bit of a weird one – most of the places we’re visiting on our travels will be places we’re spending the night, but not this one. We’d be arriving by bus at 2pm and leaving on another one by midnight. This meant we’d be carrying our rucksacks around everywhere we went.

Upon deciding that this sounded rubbish we put a plan in motion.

Step 1) Find some WiFi

Step 2) Use said WiFi to look up a hostel nearby

Step 3) Find the hostel and see if we can pay a small sum to leave our bags and maybe use the WiFi there too

The first 2 steps went off largely without any hitches, and so we arrived at Brabant Hostel with high hopes of completing phase 3.

However Nazca is a small town in the middle of the desert… so no one at the hostel spoke any English. I’d never tried to negotiate in Spanish before but how hard could it be?! Anyway, after a little struggle they did understand me and we got a room half price to stay there for the day. The hostel was basic but everything we needed. It even had a nice rooftop terrace with a view.

I love it when a plan comes together!

And here we are at the second hurdle of the day. We had hours until our night bus to Arequipa so taking a short 20 minute trip out to the Nazca Lines viewing tower didn’t seem a problem. And it wasn’t. After brushing off a slightly aggressive taxi driver trying to overcharge us for the journey we arrived at the viewpoint and took some great photos. Now all we needed to do was get the bus back into Nazca. It got darker, more time passed, no bus. Darker again, 40 minutes passed, no bus. Almost an hour after arriving, pitch black now and feeling somewhat stranded in the middle of the desert (a 5 hour walk from Nazca), I was beginning to lose faith this bus even existed. This is what we could see now:

“Would the bus even be able to see us” I remember myself thinking. A short while later though the guard on site flagged a vehicle down with his torch and we were SAVED (okay, maybe a little over the top). We got back to Nazca, had an awesome dinner at the restaurant we’d first latched onto the Wifi at and settled back into the hostel for a couple of hours before leaving the town. I think calling this an eventful day might be putting it lightly 😛