Peru Coastal Panamericana South: Paracas to Nazca

Waypoint introductions and full write-ups

1. 1. Paracas

   The Paracas peninsula juts into the Pacific from the Peruvian coast, a dry, red-and-ochre tongue of sand and rock where no rain falls for years, and it is as strange and beautiful a place as any on the Panamericana. The Paracas National Reserve covers a huge area of this coast and sea, with dramatic cliffs, empty beaches, and a Red Beach whose sand takes its colour from volcanic rock.

   Read the complete Paracas write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

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

   Planning note

   Paracas is where the day begins. Next is Huacachina.

2. 2. 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 comes up about 151 km into the recorded legs. Next is Nazca.

3. 3. 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

   The route ends here after 461 km.