Picking up from Lima, Peru: Arrival, City Streets and Dinner at Astrid y Gastón. The series starts here: Peru and Bolivia: The Andes, the Altiplano and the World’s Most Dangerous Road.

Pablo — Annelies’s husband — delivered el Burrito to the hotel at midday. A big Toyota 4Runner, their personal car, set up for exactly the kind of trip we were doing. It sat high off the ground, as Janine noted immediately. It had the particular scuffed confidence of a vehicle that has done this before and expects to do it again.

His parting advice was delivered with the calm of someone who had seen things: ignore the road rules, horn on constantly, lights on always, and if pulled over, twenty sols and a smile. We filed it away. It would prove more useful than any map.

We left Lima around one in the afternoon, heading south on the Panamericana. Getting out of the city required some commitment — six lanes of traffic operating on suggestion rather than instruction. Once on the highway, things settled. The sun didn’t appear until around two — the coast running under its own permanent layer of sea mist until it burns off somewhere south of the city limits. Petrol prices caused brief alarm until we realised the pumps run in gallons, not litres. A small mercy for the mental arithmetic. A large one for the wallet.

By evening we were in Paracas.

Paracas Beach

The hotel was right on the water. That evening we walked along the beach to find somewhere local for dinner — a casual open-air place with the sea behind it and the sun going down through the haze in a wide copper disc above the dunes.

Cocktails were ordered. I noted that the seaside village of Pisco was only a few kilometres down the road — the town that gave the country’s national spirit its name — which made the decision straightforward. The Pisco Sour arrived: frothy white, lime on the rim, the pisco doing exactly what pisco should.

It became my drink of choice for the rest of the trip.

Paracas National Park

The guide arrived early. Hotel security — no English — knocked to deliver the news. I negotiated a delay for a shower and breakfast. It seemed reasonable given what lay ahead.

The Reserva Nacional de Paracas protects a long stretch of coastal desert, sea and everything in between, and it opened up quickly — sand cliffs dropping straight to turquoise water, pelicans on the rocks, the desert running to the horizon behind. Buzz, the drone, had her first flight here, handling herself well until the local birdlife took an interest. The sea lions were pointed out with great enthusiasm. The flamingos were harder — pink smudges against the shoreline, requiring some goodwill to identify as anything other than a trick of the light.

A convoy of vehicles passed on the desert road below, tiny against the scale of it — official-looking, serious-faced. Nobody explained what it was for. Nobody asked.

After the tour, our guide wanted to show us his home town. We drove him back into Pisco — the small harbour and fish processing plant, boats still painted with the town’s name in large letters along their hulls, salt and diesel in the air.

We couldn’t stay long. Nazca was waiting.