Picking up from Peru’s Pacific Coast: The Panamericana Sur, Paracas Beach and the National Reserve. The series starts here: Peru and Bolivia: The Andes, the Altiplano and the World’s Most Dangerous Road.

Huacachina

An oasis in the desert — genuinely. Huacachina sits in a hollow between enormous sand dunes, a small town wrapped around a lagoon with palm trees and pedalo boats. It looks like a postcard someone made up, the kind of place that shouldn’t exist a few kilometres from a coastline this dry.

Janine confirmed its quality with ice cream.

The Drive to Nazca

The drive south was longer than expected. We estimated two and a half hours. It took three and a quarter, with no stops.

On the way down I followed a local and drove through a red light. Janine was more upset than the police car behind, which did nothing.

At some point the road split — a new bypass had been built. We took the old road, which turned out to involve a narrow tunnel bored straight through solid rock and a tight gorge beyond it.

The rule confirmed: always take the less worn path.

Trucks were the reason for the rest of the delay. At one point a motorbike overtook both a truck and us simultaneously, from the inside. Crash helmets, we noted, were optional.

Nazca Lines

The day was hot and dry, as befits a desert. We started with the Inca underground irrigation ducts — puquíos, a network of stone-lined channels and spiral access shafts still visible at the surface. They predate the Incas by the best part of a thousand years — the Nazca people built them to move water without losing it to evaporation, and dozens are still doing the job today. It is an engineering system built for a landscape that receives almost no rain. It has outlasted every empire that has owned it since.

But it was the lines that brought us to Nazca. The small plane held six. To show each geoglyph, the pilot used the wingtip as a pointer — banking steeply so one side could see, then tipping the other way for the other. I gave a thumbs up. Janine held on.

From the air, the scale becomes real. A figure the size of several football fields, scratched into the desert floor by a civilisation that never once saw it from above, and perfectly preserved by the dry air for close to two thousand years.

Purpose still unknown. Water, most likely, or something owed to the mountains that provide it. Nobody who made these lines left any notes. .

Chauchilla Cemetery

The afternoon was at Chauchilla — an open-air burial ground where mummies remain in their original positions, in the tombs where they were placed. The site was used for the best part of seven centuries and lost to the sand until the 1920s, when it was found — and promptly stripped — by grave robbers working ahead of the archaeologists. What’s left has been protected by law since the late 1990s. It is enough.

Cloth still wraps the figures. Pottery sits beside them. The desert air has preserved everything the looters didn’t take.

It is a long way from the ordinary tourist experience. Two figures huddled together in a small stone chamber — cloth disintegrating, ochre fabric still holding colour — tell a larger story than the guidebook.

Not for everyone. We found it fascinating.