Ica, Paracas, and Nazca: A 3-Day Trip You’ll Never Forget

The Ica, Paracas, and Nazca 3-day itinerary is any adventure traveler’s dream trifecta. Imagine sand dunes as tall as multi-story buildings, wildlife-rich waters to navigate by boat, and ancient geoglyphs best viewed from the seat of a 6-seater propeller plane. It’s a Peru travel experience that combines the thrills of any adventure tour with natural history, pre-Inca archaeology, and outdoor scenes that will etch their own geoglyphs into your mind. Here’s why we call it the “3-day trip you’ll never forget”:

You’ll visit not one, but four pre-Inca sites.

The region containing Ica, Paracas, and Nazca is a hotbed for pre-Inca remnants. Archaeologists have had a feast day trying to piece together what each remain was for. Some they’ve figured out, like the Pachacamac ruins, a series of temples, palaces, and burial sites of the Ychsma and Huari cultures; Chauchilla, a pre-Inca cemetery dating from the 9^th century; and the Candelabro, a candelabra-shaped geoglyph etched into the cliffside by the ancient Paracas culture. Others like the Nazca Lines still plague scientists. How did they get there? What was their purpose? You’ll visit each of these sites on the Ica, Paracas, and Nazca tour.

You’ll experience Peru’s version of the Galapagos Islands.

Paracas’ Ballestas Islands are a wildlife lover’s treat, full of up-close encounters with sea lions, Humboldt penguins, and more varieties of seabirds than you’ve likely ever seen in one place. The famous and revered condor is occasionally sighted in the area, as well. Without a doubt, the scene at the Ballestas Islands is chaotic but in the best sense of the word, with birds circling over head, sea lions groaning and sun-bathing on the cliffsides, and penguins waddling about onshore the guano-coated shores.

You’ll go snowboarding in a desert.

The steep and towering dunes of Ica make for prime desert boarding conditions. The tallest dunes are those located just beyond the Huacachina Oasis. A thrilling and high-speed dune buggy serves as your chair lift, delivering you to a series of sandy peaks. We supply you with the freshly waxed board for an unforgettably exhilarating experience of snowboarding the Atacama Desert of Peru. Bet you didn’t think that was a sentence you’d ever read, let alone live on a holiday in Peru!

You’ll fly over the still enigmatic Nazca Lines.

The Nazca Lines are an astounding sight, if not for their mystery than for their shear size and scope. On this Ica, Paracas, and Nazca tour, you’ll get a bird’s eye view of the massive shapes and designs etched into the earth thousands of years ago. From the seat of a small propeller plane, we’ll soar over the most iconic of the glyphs, including the spider, the hummingbird, and the monkey, as well as countless others that take no recognizable form or shape. The theories for how and why the geoglyphs were laid range from ritual sites to alien intervention. Feel free to add your own theory into the mix after your Peru holiday comes to an end.