Travel blog: One-on-one with Pachamama in Peru

Rhian Nicholson has swapped the bright lights of London for a three month journey across South America from the Pacific to the Atlantic coast. Here is her sixth blog entry:

Couch potatoes beware: there's no getting away from the great outdoors in Peru. Whether it's scrambling up dirt paths to scale volcanic peaks, sliding down sand dunes in the desert or spurring a horse on Conquistador-style through the hills, it's pretty hard to avoid a racing pulse and aching muscles.

High up in the Cordilleras, the ramshackle city of Huaraz is one of the best places in Peru to test your stamina climbing up mountains or test your nerves sliding down. On paper, the trek to Lake 69 looked pretty undemanding - more suited to Waynetta Slob than Sir Ranulph Fiennes. But how deceptive appearances can be…

It all started off well enough - a two hour drive takes you to almost 4,000 metres above sea level, an altitude high enough to leave you a little on the breathless side but still able to jump about like a deranged orang-utan if you so wish.

The first section bears an uncanny similarity to Switzerland with cows grazing in the grassy valley, waterfalls running down the towering rock faces and snow capped peaks looming in the distance.

Suddenly the trail morphs into a steep rock-strewn path and the reality of trudging up a mountain smacks you in the face. Equally, that could have been a rock dislodged by the senior citizens powering up the slopes like hyper-charged Duracell bunnies.

Still the breathtaking scenery went some way to compensating for the pain of plodding along like an asthmatic donkey - with birdseye views over the rugged valleys.

As your endurance levels go downhill, the path takes an uphill turn for the worse. At around 4,700 metres above sea level, even an Olympic-trained mountain goat would find it rather difficult to breathe let alone move without danger of collapsing, dying or even both.

Then, just as your weary body can take no more, you glimpse the lake - glimmering in the near distance, brilliantly turquoise and freezing cold from the snow dripping into it from the mountain above. It was certainly time to celebrate with a soggy cheese sandwich.

Moving from dirt tracks to sand dunes, camping out under the desert stars is one of those unforgettable experiences - and not just because you're still finding sand grains of sand in your clothes, sleeping bag and hair two weeks later.

Huacachina has become a favourite with adrenaline-seeking backpackers wanting to zip across the sand dunes in giant buggies, hurtle down steep slopes on sandboards and spend the night stargazing around a campfire with a few glasses of pisco sour for company.

And when you're soaring across the silky dunes with the wind in your hair, the sand shooting up your nose and your stomach somersaulting in quite an alarming manner you can quite see why.

After hurtling up the dunes at breakneck speed, the sandboards are unloaded from the back and the confident can strap in their feet and glide serenely down.

Those with lower levels of balance and co-ordination can lie flat on their stomachs and swoosh down headfirst, legs flailing, while desperately trying to avoid smacking into the buggies parked at the bottom.

After watching the sunset send shadows spidering across the dunes it was back to camp for the night, where dinner and drinks fuel you up to spend the night with just your thermals and sleeping bag to protect you from the cold night air.

And believe me it gets teeth-chatteringly cold - so much so that when you wake in the morning your sleeping bag, matted hair and meagre belongings are covered in a thick layer of condensation. But hey, what's a little bit of hyperthermia in return for a night in the Peruvian desert?!

A good few hours drive down the road, the mysterious Nazca lines provide a different type of exhilaration.

These giant etchings, made by lifting specific stones from the ground to reveal the lighter soil below, cover a 500 square kilometre area of the arid landscape.

A bumpy half hour flight in a light aircraft is the best way (or rather the only way) to appreciate a small selection of some 70 animal and plant drawings and around 300 geometric figures.

While the monkey, spider and hummingbird are deserving of a place in the Tate Modern, whichever Nazca tribe member was responsible for the rather abstract figures and the astronaut may well have been chewing a few too many coca leaves during the artistic process.

Rhian Nicholson