Traveling with Cruz del Sur

We travelled from Lima to Paracas with Cruz del Sur bus company. I was very impressed and will definitely use them again. When Marc got on the bus and saw our seats he said, “Dis nou f**n bederf!” (I’m not really sure what a good translation of that would be in english but he was obviously not disappointed).

Guadelupe phoned to arrange the bus tickets for us. They were dropped off at our guesthouse which was very convenient.

The Lima bus station was very organized. All the announcements were just in Spanish but the staff were helpful.

It was a comfortable four hour drive. We were served breakfast and beverages by a friendly bus attendant who could also speak some english. We drove along the coast. The scenery changed constantly from low-cost housing to ocean to fields with crops to huge sand dunes to chicken-farms on the beach.

I’ve travelled by bus a couple of times in South Africa when I was a student – it was always interesting but by far not as organized as my experience here. One of my most memorable bus trips back home was when I shared the bus with a male netball team. Besides their conversations being entertaining and very dramatical, our bus driver decided we needed more amusement. He decided to put in diesel at one of the small town’s petrol station.
We heard loud banging sounds on the roof which sounded like gunshots, followed by high pitched scraping sounds when the bus tried to reverse. The bus had driven under the roof of the little petrol station and had gotten stuck. The top of the bus and the station’s roof was a damaged mess. Everybody had to get out, the bus’s tyres were all deflated and the bus was eventually pushed to freedom.

Paracas bus-stop is quite small. We walked the remaining 600m to our backpacker. Paracas seems like a really nice and relaxed place to be….we might consider lengthening our two night stay!