Finding Penguins

My sister loves Penguins. Therefore by proxy, I love them too. Megan loves all critters so she loves Penguins. 

[Pink Flamingos in Paracas National Park] Oddly, there are Humbolt Penguins in Peru. We learned this when we went Seattle's Woodland Park Zoo with my sister in late December and looked at the Peruvian Penguins.

After studying the map and doing a little research we discovered that the Paracas National Park in Peru is home to Peruvian Penguins. We made a long day of riding from about 100 miles North of Lima, through Lima and its crazy traffic, and then another 150 miles south to Paracas and stayed the night. I ate some more Ceviche (this time it didn't make me sick), Megan drank some Peruvian wine (not bad) and then the next morning we saddled up her motorcycle and went into the park to look for Penguins.

Paracas is a long stretch of protected coast line with giant cliffs that tumble into the ocean. If I had to guess, I would say that it gets less than 1" of rain a year and is therefore a big dry salty desert.

Without a lot of information other than "don't take the boats out to see the Penguins, they disturb them" and "you can see some Penguins from a cliff somewhere in the park" we paid our 2 dollar entry fee to the park and went to a place on the map called La Mina (why not?). 10 km of good dirt road and we didn't find any Penguins. A lot of sunbathers and swimmers. 

Ok... how about going up over this hill on a random single track to see if there are any Penguins. This went on for a while. We hadn't packed a lunch so after a few hours of driving across the desert looking for views of the ocean we were about to give up. 

We saw lots of seals on the cliffs below, we saw lots birds (boobys?) but no Penguins.

[looking for Penguins in all the wrong places]

[Are there penguins here?]

On a last whim, we decided to follow one more track to look check it out. I was hungry, Megan was hot and hungry but we needed to find these swimming birds.

And there they were. Penguins. And they were pretty cute.

[If you look closely you can see some lines in the background] After a nice meal back in Paracas, we were back on the road to Nasca to see the famous Nasca lines. this tower lets you see a couple of them. If you really want to see them, one needs to go in an airplane but since this costs $100 per person I think we will have to make do with the viewing tower.

One a last note about meeting people on the road, as I was sitting on the side of the road trying to figure out why my chain fell off, this guy and his wife pull up in a really nice truck and start asking us about our trip. Well it turns out he is Emilio Scotto who is somewhat legendary in the Motorcycle world for riding a Honda Goldwing Motorcycle around and around the world for 10 years. Now he is out promoting a rally in Argentina by driving this truck around. That's something I could do...