The Beginning of Winter

While it may be the summer solstice up north where most of you are, it is the winter solstice down here, and we do feel it, but not as much as the locals. We are at least accustomed to quite a bit of cold weather. We found out that the night after we left Puno was one of the coldest they'd had, and about 30 people died of exposure, many of them children. Very sad. We are now in Ica in the desert. We are staying next to a laguna. It looks like an oasis in the Sahara because the laguna is surrounded by high sand dunes and palm trees--not something we expected to find here. One of mom's students spends the summers here in Ica, so we are going to try and see him and his family. We are also going to do tours of the Nasca lines and the Islas de las Ballestas from here. We decided to settle down in one place for awhile and tour from here. We arrived early this morning on a night bus from Arequipa. The service was almost like being on a plane, including an attendant and meal and reclining seats. We even left from the Terrapuerto which sounds to me like a play on words in Spanish, combining earth (tierra) and port (puerto), though it may just be a word in itself that I'd never heard before.