Peru Coastal Panamericana South: Huacachina to Camana

Waypoint introductions and full write-ups

1. 1. Huacachina

   Huacachina is the kind of place that looks like a joke the Peruvian desert is playing on you. A small lagoon, ringed with palms and old-fashioned lamp posts, sits in a bowl of enormous sand dunes five kilometres from the city of Ica. Local legend says it formed when a princess, bathing, saw a hunter, dropped her mirror and fled; the mirror became the lake, and her robe the dunes. The truth is rather drier, a natural spring that has been dwindling for decades as water is pumped out for farms nearby.

   Read the complete Huacachina write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   Huacachina is where the day begins. Next is Nazca.

2. 2. Nazca

   Nazca sits in the middle of one of the driest places on earth, a small desert town of about twenty-four thousand people on the Pan-American Highway, famous for lines drawn in the ground that nobody quite agrees on. The Nazca Lines, a collection of enormous figures and straight lines scratched into the stony plain, were made between about two thousand and fifteen hundred years ago by removing dark surface pebbles to expose the pale ground beneath. Birds, a monkey, a spider, a hummingbird: they were drawn on a scale that can only be appreciated from the air, and in 1994 they were listed as a World Heritage site.

   Read the complete Nazca write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   Nazca comes up about 312 km into the recorded legs. Next is Camana.

3. 3. Camaná

   Camaná is a fishing and farming town at the mouth of a river that actually reaches the sea, which in this part of Peru is a minor miracle. South of Lima, the Pacific coast is one of the driest deserts in the world, a belt of sand and bare rock that goes on for a thousand kilometres, and only a handful of rivers carry enough water down from the Andes to make a green valley. The Camaná is one of them, and the ribbon of rice fields, orchards and reeds around the town is startling after hours of grey and yellow. The town has about sixteen thousand people, with beaches nearby, and it is a favourite summer holiday spot for families from Arequipa, who drive down the long road from the mountains.

   Read the complete Camana write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   The route ends here after 1102 km.