Travel Recaps: Ica

Only a month after our trip ended, here we are at the end of our travel recaps.  We had a nice long weekend for the Easter Holiday and will update you on some of the Easter events later in the week.

But, first: Ica!  Ica was our last stop on our trip and we spent a day tour seeing the highlights.  We got to visit two Bodegas Artesanales, which produce wine and pisco, the grape brandy that is the national drink of Peru. 

These Bodegas are called "artesanales" (like artisan) because they continue to use traditional processing methods, doing things by hand, as compared with other Bodegas that use machines.  We got to see a short tour of how the wine or pisco is made, starting with the place where the grapes are smashed to let the juice out:

From there, it is sent through various tubes and sits in vats for a while.  These are the traditional containers they use--I think they are made of clay and usually closed with a bamboo pole. 

At the end of the tour, we got to taste a few of their products including different types of pisco (very strong when drunk straight), their pisco sour mix (doing it yourself is better) and a couple of wines.

From there we visited a second bodega, where we did not get to see the process of making wine but did get to wander around in their "museum" while one of the owners helped us sample a few of the wines. Here is the "museum":

Full of random old vats for wine and lots and lots of stuff, including a fake alligator!  The cool part here, which of course there is no picture for, is that he had these bamboo poles hanging up by the vats that had wine in them, and there was a part hollowed out so that he could stick the pole into the vat, get out a small portion of wine, and pour it into a glass for us to try.  We tried wines with descriptions ranging from sweet (very very sweet) to semi-dry (still quite sweet).  But it was fun!

After having our fill of tastes, it was time to head for the great outdoors.  About 30 km from Ica is the lake of Huacachina, which is famous in Peru because it is pictured on the back of the 50 Soles bill.  Here it is:

It is quite an oasis in the middle of all this sand, and we had a nice stroll around the lake and bought some nice cold water.  The hill of sand you can see behind you is popular for some people, I think mostly tourists, because you can sand-board on it, like surfing, but on the sand.  We did not try this.

Here is JP checking out the lake:

The other interesting part of our tour was seeing some of the continuing damage from the earthquake in 2007 that had also affected Pisco.  Right off the Plaza de Armas (main square), we could see the Cathedral of Ica, which is closed because its whole top dome had caved in after the earthquake:

We also drove out to a neighborhood called Luren, where there is another church that is currently closed.  There is a disagreement among the neighbors among whether it is worth spending money to restore the church (like millions of dollars) or if they should raze it and start over.  Here it is today:

You can see pretty clearly that the central tower used to extend higher and that there is significant damage on both sides as well.  Here is a picture I found online of the pre-earthquake church:

source

After our tour, we hung out at our lovely old hotel, as we blogged about earlier, and then headed to the bus station for our last bus, only 15 hours overnight from Ica to Tacna!

It was great to see so many different parts of Peru and explore together, and we are looking forward to doing a few more trips before we leave.

Coming up, highlights from Semana Santa (holy week).  Happy Easter to all!