I am in a really really beautiful country!!!!!!!!!

Friday was a great great day! Oh man! We got up and got on a boat in the Pacific Ocean! It was wonderful! Here's the deal: not far from Paracas are the Islas Ballestas. These are sort of uninhabited islands. They are uninhabited by humans, but very much inhabited by birds and starfish and sea lions!! So we took a boat there and saw some awesome things! Look!

THIS IS THE PACIFIC OCEAN!!! I WAS ON IT!!!

Look at that!! This is a picture of the Reserva Nacional de Paracas from the Pacific Ocean.

Look closely at this picture. Just left of center, there's a candelabra! This candelabra was carved into the desert by people from the Paracas culture, a pre-Incan society.

And this here is part of the Islas Ballestas!!! Oh man, it was so beautiful! It is hard to tell in this picture, but the rocks in the background are COVERED in birds. I have never seen so many birds in my life! They were ALL OVER!!! And there were PENGUINS!!! Oh man oh man it was cool.





LOOK AT ALL THOSE BIRDS!!! And... sea lions? Yes!!

It was super pretty. These pictures really... don't do this place justice at all. Also, you can't really tell in this picture, but the islands are COVERED in bird poop. That shouldn't be surprising, because there are loads of birds. The surprising thing is that every few years, people come to the island to "harvest" the bird poop and sell it as fertilizer!

Eventually our boat returned to Paracas, and we had about an hour before we got on a bus for a tour of the Reserva Nacional de Paracas. It's a desert! And it's really big! It's actually the driest desert in the world. It was beautiful , but not the same way Lake Michigan is beautiful or the way flowers are beautiful. It was beautiful in a "wow-this-place-is-huge-and-I'm-really-tiny" kind of way.

There were some truly awesome look out places that we stopped at. Look at this!

Our guide crushed some of these rocks and showed us that they are all made of salt!! There was a huge salt deposit thingy streching across the desert!

This little path here? Yeah, it's all salt!!





We drove around this desert in a bus. I honestly am amazed that our bus didn't tip over. We cut across some very very steep slopes.

This here is the only red beach in Peru!!

And after the tour, we went to a restaurant in the tiny town (ok, it's not really a town--no one lives there--it's just a place that lots of fishermen go fishing and have about three restaurants where they sell their fishies).  After eating, we sat out on these rocks for a bit befor the bus returned to Paracas. I guess people used to live there, but the town was destroyed by a tsunami a few years ago, and now it's only a fishing location.

Here's one of the restaurants in the fishing place. Pelicans are cool.

After we got back to Paracas, we went to eat dinner. It was delicious -- arroz con mariscos! I'm not quite sure what all I ate... I know it was rice and lots of little things that lived in the ocean.

We spent the evening walking around Paracas a bit. We saw Alfredo about 67 times. (No, that's an exageration. But between walking around the town the previous day as well, we saw him at least 6 times. The town is quite little, so it's easy to run in to the same person over and over again. So, we did.)

For all of the breathtaking things that we saw on this trip, I think that Friday night might have been my favorite part. Sydney, Amy, and I sat on a bench by the beach for a while and talked and laughed and sang and prayed and relaxed and shared life together. And after that, a bit cold, tired, yet completely content and perhaps a bit slap-happy, we walked a short ways down the beach and stared up at the really cool stars!Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity! (Psalm 133:1)