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Happy Birthday to me.....

Hello All,

Billy has given me special access to the blog for one day only so that I can update you all on my Birthday celebrations.

We started the day off in Lima, up at 5am so that we could get going by 5.30am, the drive to Nasca included a couple of stops along the way. Yesterday evening we picked up eight new members of our tour so Jack is now completely full. Getting all the bags on to the truck was a bit of an effort but at least some of the new bags weighed more than mine!

We drove for four hours until we were south of Pisco. This was the epicentre for the earthquake that struck Peru in August. Very little has been done in the way of repairs and whole communities are still camped out in their gardens thanks to their UN tents. On our trip so far we have done a couple of sponsred events, tent challenge, ipod challenge and Billy is still only half-way through growing his beard for Movember (the sooner that´s over the better...) but all have required entry fees for the participants. Between our group we managed to raise ove $200 which we spent in Lima on clothes, shoes, schoolbags and of course footballs. We dropped these off with a local family who help Tucan out in this area arranging trips for the tour groups. They were very grateful and will pass on what they do not need to other families.

While we were near Pisco we visited the Ballestras Islands -  the Peruvian answer to the Galapagos, but on a much smaller scale. We had a two hour bost trip around the islands and while we were there we saw pelicans, Peruvian Boobies (there is no end to the booby jokes 34 adults can come up with in a confined space), Sealions, turns and Cormerants. We arrived back to shore in time for a picnic lunch at the side of the road.

Back on the truck and another couple of hours until our next stop at Huacachina. Here Billy went sandboarding and I visited the oldest vineyard in Peru, the Picasso Winery. Established in the 1850's by the Italian family that still owns the site the vineyards are surrounded on all sides by sand dunes. We had a quick tour of the winery and also saw the huge copper stills used to distill the local firewater - Pisco. We were lucky enough to try a red wine, Rose and some neat Pisco. At 38% alcohol the Pisco had quite a kick. It is usually mixed with lemon juice and egg white to make Pisco Sour, much more civilised.

Another two hours on Jack and we arrived in Nasca. It was getting dark at this point so the whole group pulled out a superhuman effort to get all the tents up, food out and cooking started in about twenty minutes. Amazing what the promise of a party can do to people . We had a huge BBQ, two vats of Sangria and lots of BBQ´d fruit to keep us going. Music came from a large speaker hanging out of Jacks´ cab, shame we weren´t the only ones on the campsite that night...

At about 10pm I got a birthday cake. I duly blew out the candles but in Peru that´s just not enough. The tradition, and I did have some prior warning as I´d seen it in a restauraunt a couple of days before, was for the birthday person to take a bite out of the cake while someone else pushed the cake up in to their face. I imagine that this is why they bought me the biggest chocolate cake I´d ever seen with the deepest icing possible. You can well imagine what happend next and the pictures are below to prove it, needless to say it went everywhere, even up my nose. I´d had a lovely, if very long, day though and just as I was about to retire to my sleeping bag I got given a key for a room at the hotel nextdoor. I got a good nights sleep on a proper bed. Fantastic!

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