Arequipa - Peruvian Town on the Pan-American Highway

Sitting on the Plaza de Armas, looking across at the broad bronze fountain, white walls and colonnaded shops there is the feeling that you've stepped back to colonial times, but without the violent shadow that always seems to mar similar associations in Cusco.

Buses normally arrive early in the morning, but if you're not too dead on your feet then while the tour groups are out communing with nature in Colca Canyon , you can stroll round the miniature town of the Santa Catalina Convent. Inside its high walls the tiny streets are lined with pretty white and orange buildings and little colonnaded gardens.

Visitors can see the bare rooms of the convent's previous occupants or the yard with a water channel and basins where the nuns used to do their laundry, and even in these public areas there's an atmosphere of devout austerity. You feel round any corner you might come across an old lady in white mumbling over a rosary. In the afternoon I bought a picnic and headed out by collectivo to the quiet district of Paucarpata, where rolling, sunny maize fields run for miles under the faintly threatening spectre of the city's volcano, Misti.

Leaving Arequipa , I took an evening bus up the Pan-American Highway to a glorified fishing village called Chala, then from there a taxi to Puerto Inca, Cusco 's old port. There's a solitary hotel there which allows camping, but tempted as I was I'd decided to sleep out in the dunes like a true child of Kerouac, and, collecting kindling for a fire as I went along, eventually settled in a sheltered gully not far from the shore.

Predictably my cheap lighter promptly fired its flint off into the sand, so supper was a tin of peaches, but sitting feeling faintly ridiculous in the darkness, I reflected that they'd been heavy anyway. With my backpack pillow I had a surprisingly good night's sleep, waking up to a pale dawn and the sound of the sea.

To be honest the ruins of the old port weren't anything extraordinary, but I think the problem is more with Peru itself. When you've looked out over Macchu Picchu or wandered the overgrown temples of Choquekira you get quite blasé about ruins which would be quite respectable anywhere else. Wandering back past the hotel, a waiter cheerily inquired if I'd heard about the bus strike, and my heart sank, because for a nation so seemingly easy going about everything Peruvians take strikes very seriously.

They occur with distressing frequency, and any buses which do run have to dodge piles of burning tyres and brick-hurling mobs, which left me in a sticky one because my plan had been to walk the three kilometres to the highway then pick up a coach to Nazca. A walk back to Chala seemed unavoidable, and though the distance was rather further than I'd thought, I had amusement enough from the apparent ignorance of Peruvian truckers to the practice of hitchhiking. As I stuck my thumb out lorry after lorry thundered past and every one gave me a broad smile and a thumbs-up in response.

In Chala I found a cheery little man who, for about ten soles, offered to let me tag along on his maize run to Nazca in a half derelict Chevrolet with an engine like an aeroplane. There was no sign of any roadblocks, and I wondered if someone had cancelled the strike on a whim and just not told the drivers.

So it was that I finally hit Nazca nicely doused in dust and sweat and much in need of beer, which I found in a grimy looking restaurant where they served good ceviche (cubed raw trout marinated in lemon juice, which is much more delicious than it sounds). My hostel, like most in Nazca, doubled as a tour office, and I booked a flight over the Nazca lines the next morning.

Now it's interesting that when you go to a place as cheap as Peru everyone worries far more about their money. Someone who will happily pay three pounds for a pint in London will argue with the tenacity of a pensioner over a five pence difference in taxi fare. At about twenty five dollars it's expensive to fly over the lines, but there is no point in going to Nazca and not doing it, because they are spectacular and because nothing makes you wonder why they're there like seeing them in all their glory.

There are in fact many more of them than you expect, stretching out in a mass of zigzags far below you. Included with the flight was a tour of the old aqueducts, a line close up (where you could see the different coloured grains of sand that made it up), a Nazca cemetery, and a rather macabre tent in someone's garden full of mummies – one sol entry paid to a squinting crone in a rocking chair. Beneath the barren sands of Nazca, it would appear, lie the remnants of an entire civilization more or less abandoned to the mercy of their own descendants.

One of the best things about Peru is the massive diversity of its terrain. When compared to its mountains, offshore islands, nature reserves or deep jungles, the vast expanses of desert sometimes seem a touch unremarkable, but even on a whistle-stop run like mine you can find plenty of interest and even a gentle appeal in the scattered, tin-roofed villages and the dunes snaking away into the horizon.