Ecuador Part Two: Canoa and Quito

Righto. Sitting in a rather nice and comfy internet cafe in Quito´s Mariscal Sucre. The last time we spoke (well I spoke and you listened, like good blogees should), we were in Canoa, and I remembering talking up the place quite a lot. So now I´d better try do it some justice by writing good things about it. Here goes.

Canoa is a tiny little beach villiage reasonably close to the town of San Vicente, which lies across a large inlet in the sea from Bahia de Caraquez, a city (with only 2 ATMs for christ´s sake!). The town itself (Canoa) consists of one main road along the beach (made of sand which sort of just morphs into the beach sand), and another main road which extends about 3 blocks up and away from the beach, where you get to the road out of town, which sits next to some medium size cliffs. Are you picturing it right now? Good.

The entire town appears to be made of bamboo, with light wooden frames. They take thick pieces of bamboo and flatten them out to make panels with which they build everything. Considering there was a massive earthquake in Bahia in 2002, I don´t think they´re being too smart, but hey, what do I know about antiseismic construction? While not very sensible, the building habit does give the town a really laid back look, and makes the buildings blend in with the palm tree lined beach, and makes you want to order horribly sweet and colourful cocktails and fake a jamaican accent. Alright mon, I be ramblin on bout one or two tings.

While the town at first appears to be super laid back, all this changes when the sun goes down, when the two main disco bars (which are opposite each other) open their doors, put their speakers outside and play the worst music you have ever heard. Since they are clearly competing with each other, both bars keep turning the music up until it distorts horribly, and The Worst Music in the World ceases to be music at all. This continent has some great music, although I have no idea where the hell it is, because for some reason everybody just listens to something called Reggaeton. If it sounds bad, its because it is. It generally involves a hip hop beat that sounds as if a psychopathic child made it, one morning right after he put his cat in the microwave. On top of this they dub some really bad rapping (more like someone just shouting at you), and then for good measure they add all the sound effects they can - sirens, hooters, breaking glass, truck horns, whistles... Its really really awful. So after sitting at one of these horrible bars, Nadia and I returned back to our hostel (on the same street as both satan bars), feeling that we were not going to sleep well, and that Canoa´s nightlife was not going to be nearly as good as its daylife.

The daylife was good. We spent our days lying around on the beach, swimming in the warm water, exploring the bay, eating more incredible seafood for next to nothing, and generally just chilling out and being beach bums. Our evenings got better after our discovery of the Surf Shak, a cool little bar run by a dutch guy called Frans who has been living in Canoa for 3 years, running the bar and giving jobs to the travellers who pass through. The Surf Shak was a good place to kick back over a beer and meet some other travellers. The evening we stumbled upon it happened to be one of the employees, Konrad´s, birthday, and this resulted in most of the night being turned into happy hours (Frans proudly proclaimed that if he´d wanted to make money he would have stayed in Europe), and us being invited to Konrad´s birthday bonfire on the beach, a party organised for him by the locals. Konrad is from Switzerland and has been in Canoa for a few months. We arrived to find a proper bonfire (a good 5 meters of wood in flames), a braai with fresh fish sizzling away, and some rather drunk locals, who keep giving us whole fish straight off the braai. They were the most delicious fish ever.

Apart from Konrad, we met Greg, a large chap from Kentucky who´d also been living in Ecuador for three years. Greg runs a hotel on the beach and also sells beachfront real estate (which, by the way, if anyone is interested in a good investment, sells for $100 a square meter, and is going up and up and up). Aside from that, he has a stake in Surf Shak, and so occaisionally mans the bar (and occaisionally dances on it). He also takes travellers on tandem paragliding flights. We had heard about the paragliding and so inquired with Frans, who told us Greg would be arriving soon. He arrived in his truck, jumped out and said, in a strong Kentucky accent, `Who´s goin flyin?´, and when we said we were interested, he replied `Let me just get these 3 shots of tequila in me and we´ll get goin`. He was joking. As it turns out the light didn´t last long enough for us to go that day, but we patiently waited, and were rewarded with a perfect sunset and perfect winds, and had one of the best experiences of the trip so far. Basically, Greg took us up to his launch site on the cliffs behind Canoa, attached one of us to his harness, and we ran off the cliff. Needless to say, it was an amazing experience - for 30 minutes we were birds, flying around wherever we wanted. The idea is to use the constant winds that hit the cliffs and rise up to get a bit of altitude, and then follow the birds into the thermals that randomly form, thus getting more and more altitude and allowing for a longer flight. After about half an hour though, the flight was over and we landed gently on the beach. We both decided then and there that we had to learn how to do that.

We´d spend our afternoons in the surf shak, relaxing (what else have we been doing?) and talking crap to our fellow Canoan relaxers. One night we spoke afrikaans most of the night to the Dutch people - they laughed at the strange words, but we could have a conversation, except that our Afrikaans is kak! We also met Steve, a 40 year old man from Newcastle, who, in his own words `liked drinking`. He spent most days in the bar, and would simultaneously order a litre of beer and a litre of cuba libre (rum and coke), and proceed to get plastered. Steve was a proper Newcastle Lout, an authentic hooligan, but he was a funny chap. At about 6pm everyday, he´d say, `Right, lets get absolutely wankered! Uno mas Cuba Libre, por favor` (say it in a thick Jordy accent).

But eventually it was time to leave Canoa. We felt that, after a week, if we didn´t leave immediately, we´d end up there for months and months, in the CanoaTrap. However, in order to leave for Quito we had to get to Bahia at night, and we hadn´t thought that this would be problematic until we realised there were no more buses to San Vicente (where you have to go to catch the ferry to Bahia). However, we had a bus to catch, and could not throw in the towel so easily, so we hitched a lift in the back of a pickup truck filled with naartjies. It was a very enjoyable journey, seeing the countryside with the wind in our hair, eating naarties; far better than smelling someone´s fart on a crowded bus for an hour.

We got to Bahia, and made it onto our bus, and, after a not so nice overnight busride, we got to Quito at 5am. Since Quito is back up in the Andes (2800m), its cold, which we didn´t like. Its also got a bad reputation for crime, particularly to tourists, which we didn´t like either. However, after two days here, we´ve decided that it´s quite a nice place afterall.

For a city of only 1,5m people, its gigantic. Set in a long valley, the thin city comes out of the horizon to the South and flows North through the valley like a river. The city itself is divided into the Old Town, with all the historic sqaures, churches, museums and cathedrals, and the New Town, with all the restaurants, internet cafes and trendy bars. Both areas are really cool places, in very different ways. The New Town is where we are staying (because all the hostels are here), in the Mariscal Sucre neighbourhood. A colourful bustling place that reminds both of us of Melville or Camdentown, its full of street cafes and interesting restaurants. Unfortunately, its also a bit of a dodgy place after dark, and a street corner quite near us is known as Mugging Corner. Charming. To put the Mother´s minds at ease, we are taking official taxis around after dark, and are being extra cautious.

Since Quito´s Old Town is a Unesco World Heritage Site, we thought it was probably worth a look, and so we spent the whole day today explorings its many Plazas, old churches and cathedrals, and amazing cobbled streets lined with old but immaculate buildings. Besides just exploring and taking the atmosphere in, we visited some really great historic buildings. The Teatro Bolivar was Quito´s most refined theater until it was practically destroyed by a fire in the 90s. However, they have been restoring it ever since, and offer tours through the theater showing its progression from burnt wreckage to functioning theatre. We also visited a church, La Compañia de Jesus, that appeared to be made entirely of gold (7 tons of Gold was used to gild the walls, ceilings, and altars). Although we were forbidden to take any pictures, this blog goes beyond the call of duty to bring you the footage, so I bravely took some sneaky shots. They´re golden.

Possibly the best thing we saw today was the giant Basilica, a massive gothic building that you can see from just about anywhere in the Old Town. What´s unique about the Basilica is that you can climb right to the top of one of the towers, which, after seeing the tower, should probably not be allowed. After a series of wooden planks and dodgy ladders, you clamber up to the top of the windy and eerie tower, from where you get a spectacular 360 view of Quito. After this, our appetite for views only increased, and since Quito is surrounded by mountains, good views are easy to come by. After a very strenuous walk up and up and up, we arrived at Cafe Mosaico, an overpriced place with the best view of any city cafe in the world (probably). After having a drink (and realising that we could not afford any more) we decided to make our way back down and head back to the New Town. This was made difficult by the fact that Ecuador is currently drafting a new constitution, and this has caused many people to want to shout at the President. Since the President carries out his business in a building on the main sqaure, he can easily here this angry shouting, and this encourages people to take to the streets and march to go and shout at the Prez together. Unfortunately, these massive protests do tend to slow things down a bit. Eventually though, we made it back to our hostel, exhausted.

Dedicated bloggers we are though, so we fought off the fatigue and vallently created this lovely blog for your enjoyment. I do hope you have enjoyed it.

Tomorrow we plan to visit the Equatorial line, which is just 25km north of Quito, where we will jump back and forth between hemispheres and flush toilets to see which way the water spins. It promises to be an interesting day. After that we are heading north to Colombia, our last country on this continent, and the last in total before Cuba. Its been a crazy ride so far.

Right, that´s it.

Here are pics:

http://picasaweb.google.es/steveo.zogg/Quito

http://picasaweb.google.es/steveo.zogg/ParaglidingCanoa

http://picasaweb.google.es/steveo.zogg/Canoa

Ecuador!: A Coastal Voyage

Hello there avid blog readers. Hold on to your laptops and get a piece of leather to bite down on, because we have decided, on this hot and sweaty evening in Canoa, to grace you with a blogpost!

Well, where were we? Peru. As I´m sure you´ll agree, Mancora was a pretty cool place. However, as paradisical as it was, we still had a continent to conquer, and so we decided that we had seen quite enough of Peru, and that we should rob a bank and head for the border, so we did (except for robbing the bank). At midnight in Mancora we got on a dodgy looking bus headed for Ecuador. The border crossing at Tumbes has earned the title as The Worst Border Crossing in South America, which is something we thought we should see. However, upon arriving there at 3am, the only stressful part was waiting in the queue. Queues here do not function in the normal fashion, which is where everyone lines up in an orderly fashion. Here, everyone crowds around, shouts, tries to slip in from the side while looking innocent, and maybe someone gets stabbed. Other than that though, it was reasonably painless, and the nice Ecuadorian Official granted us a 60 day stay in the country. The rest of the bus ride was absolutely horrific. As well as being a long distance bus, with seated passengers, it was also functioning as a short distance bus, with standing passengers crammed into the aisle, meaning that for many many hours my face was squished against the backsides of many different Peruvians (and Ecuadorians). I elbowed many of them in the ribs and then pretended to be asleep. This pleased me.

Thankfully, this second bus was luxurious, air conditioned, and short, and that afternoon we arrived at the coastal (hippie Capital of the world), Montañita. We found a decent hostel on the beachfront (Montañita only extends three roads back from the beachfront anyway), and set about exploring the town. It was then that we discovered that we were not like the rest of the people in this town, since we, for some reason, did not enjoy walking barefoot through the streets and bathed ourselves more than once a month. Being in a town where your hygene habits set you apart from everyone else is an interesting experience.

After hanging around Montañita for a few days, we decided that we did not like the place. I have no problem with hippies, or hippie towns for that matter. I do have a problem with fake hippies and trustafarians (rasta´s with trust funds), and towns that have been constructed entirely for tourists who marvel at how ¨magical¨ the place is. Montañita has nothing to do with Ecuador, and may as well be on another planet. I wish it was.

Don´t get me wrong, its not a terrible place (compared to Benoni) - the different kinds of food were great, the place was laid back and chilled, and there were no naughty people who wanted to stab us. A highlight was witnessing the evening enjoyed by The Drunkest Girl in the Whole Wide World - who clearly had aspirations to be both a prostitue and a drunk, but was struggling to find a way to blend the two professions. Her conflict fascinated us for hours, as did her conversation with a stray dog. Another highlight was walking down the beach and meeting a man who held in his hands the biggest freakin Oyster I have ever seen. The beast could have fed a family of four. ¿ But somewhere between the giant dreamcatcher hanging on the main road, and the hundreds of far out people who decided to be different by all dressing the same and doing the same thing and telling the same stories, who all tried to sell us their artisan products, we became disillusioned with the place and decided to leave.

We had heard of a place just a few hours north called Puerto Lopez, where, at this time of year, many many many Humpback whales gather to, well, hump each other in the calm waters of the tranquil bay. The prospect of seeing humpback whales humping (and the many inappropriate jokes I could make), was too enticing to miss. The minute we arrived in Puerto Lopez, we were glad to be out of Montañita. Puerto Lopez is a tiny town nestled in a lovely bay, with a wide beach and an authentic feel. Although the whales do attract tourists, the place somehow retains an air of simplicity and authenticity, and although it might not be as groovy as its neighbour to the South, its a much better way to experience a small Ecuadorian coastal town.

Because so many whales come to Puerto Lopez in August for their whale orgy (how do they even do it?), whale watching boat trips can guarantee whale sightings. Thus, we handed over our $20, and boarded the boat, along with many other people who clearly had no idea they were so prone to motion sickness. First, we got to see some Boobies. Before you get the wrong idea, I´m talking about blue-footed Boobies, rare coastal birds with blue feet. After seeing a pair of large boobies flapping around on a beach, we moved on to some whale watching. Within 20 minutes, we had spotted our first whales. There were two of them, and they were splashing about - I don´t want to jump to any conclusions, but I think they may have been doing something naughty. While staring at the water, a 17m whale jumped right out, its entire body suspended in the air before it crashed back into the water in the ultimate Cannonball splash. This was such a flabbergasting sight that, even though it happened three times, we did not manange to capture it on camera because we were far too amazed.

We had a whale of a time.

Evenings in Puerto Lopez were quite something. While the place did not have much nightlife, it made up for this with its collection of drinks shacks on the beach. These bamboo bars served cocktails (with ice that served the dual functions of cooling your drink, and then later acting as a laxative), toasted sandwiches, and fruit smoothies. They all had their own sections of beach, littered with a few palm trees, with hammocks strung in between them. At night they light up some beach fires, which you can chill out in front of while sipping cold beer and listening to fantastic cuban music. It was pretty fantastic. The only thing wrong with these beach shacks was that their owners had no clue how to constuct a fire. Instead of getting a flame going with kindling, and then gradually building up the fire so that it can burn large logs, they simply piled up small twigs and set them alight with petrol. Then they would look confused when the fire did not stay alight for long, and add more petrol.

After a few evenings of this, we decided to get back on the road and continue up the coast to our next stop, the famous town of Montecristi. Montecristi is famous for producing the greatest hat on the planet - the sombrero de paja toquilla (otherwise known as the Panama hat). The hats are made of toquilla straw, which grows in the mountains surrounding Montecristi, and the last remaining hat weavers all reside in the tiny town, dilligently weaving hats. Apparently, and sadly, the skills of hat weaving are being lost due to the booming factory hat trade, and now there are only a handful of people in Montecristi who weave the hats. The finest hat of all, the superfino, can take up to four months to weave, and a hat of 32 weaves per inch will fetch over $5000 in the States. In Montecristi, you can buy one of them for a tenth of the price. Of course, you could always just buy a $10 factory made hat from Cuenca, but then you wouldnt be buying a piece of art, a piece of a dying tradition.

While the hats are fine, the town is not, and the only reason to be there would be to buy a hat. When we asked the busdriver to let us off in Montecristi, he gave us a look as if to say, ¨you want to get off here?¨. Nevertheless, we headed into the onehorse town, and even managed to bargain the price of the room at the only hotel in town. The man bargaining with us must have been an idiot, since we had no choice but to stay at his hotel. After checking in we set about town looking at the different hats and marvelling at their fineness. After searching around for a restaurant (I don´t think they eat food in Montecristi, since there seems to be very little of it around), we found a man making burgers from a stand, and eagerly paid him money for food that we knew would make our bowels dance the Macarena. The next day, we finally found the hats we were looking for. I am now the proud owner of a handmade Montecristi superfino - while it might not be the finest hat of all, its 26 weaves per inch are fine enough to make a grown man cry. Nadia has begun to get worried, since I lovingly stroke my hat each evening and talk for hours of its beauty.

After Montecristi, the plan was to head to the port of Manta, only 15 minutes away, and hang around there a few days before heading up the coast. However, when we arrived in the dirty port city, with our backpacks all ready to go, at the bus station, we decided to bite the bullet and get on another bus headed for Canoa, a tiny paradise close to the equator, a full day´s drive up the coast. That morning we had luckily hunted down some helpless toasted sandwiches in Montecristi, but other than that, we did not manage to get much other food. After three different buses and a long hungry day, we arrived in Canoa only to discover that we had only $7 between us(since our cards did not work at the ATM in montecristi) , and that there was no way of drawing money in Canoa. Tired and hungry we checked into our hostel, put our bags down, and had to backtrack an hour to the nearest town with an ATM, San Vicente. We hitched a ride in the truck of a farmer who had an impressive moustache, who kindly argreed to drop us off in San Vicente. When we arrived, we discovered the ATM there did not work either, and thus had to fork out some of our last money to get on a boat (a boat!) and head across the bay to the bigger town of Bahia de Caraquez. In Bahia, we discovered, to our horror, that our cards did not work at either of the ATMs, and concluded that there was a problem with our cards, and not the ATMs. We also concluded that, since we only had $4 left (not even enough to get back to Canoa), and it was 3am in South Africa, we were in a bit of trouble. At this point we decided to try and wake some people in SA so that we could get some assistance from home, to hopefully put us in touch with Rennies so that they could sort out our cards. We thus decided to put our remaining money towards some internet time, and sent out an SOS signal. Luckily, the Limerick Writing Rory awoke from his slumber and came to our assistance, putting us in touch with someone at Rennies, who, after I explained our situation via email, phoned the internet cafe and eventually organised for us to collect a money transfer at a Western Union the next morning. That did not solve the problem of how we would get back to our hostel in Canoa, since it was now 10pm our time, and we had no money. We thus checked into a cheap hotel that accepted a credit card, and miraculously found a restaurant that was still open and that also accepted credit card. As we ate our amazing hamburgers (the first thing we´d eaten since the toasted sandwich) we breathed a sigh of relief an reflected on the rather hectic day we´d had.

The next day we collected our money and made it back to Canoa. Canoa is a damn cool place. Visited only by a few Gringo backpackers, this beautiful beach town is a serious gem. The kind of place where people plan to spend a few days and end up staying a month, a year, a lifetime. That is where we are now, loving it. Our Canoan adventures will have to be saved for the next blog, since we are still doing our hard research which involves lying on the beach and eating prawns for lunch.

Not bad. Not bad indeed.

To see more pics, go to

http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/steveo.zogg/Montañita

http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/steveo.zogg/PuertoLopez

http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/steveo.zogg/MontecristiLandOfThePanamaHat

Until next time amigos,

Adios!

Mancora

Helloo!

I am currently sunburnt and sweating in an internet cafe with walls made out of bits of bamboo. Most of Mancora is in fact made out of bamboo. The guy who runs it clearly believes he was supposed to be born in South Central LA, not in North Western Peru, and is blasting some really bad music and nodding his head like an idiot. But let´s not jump the gun. Mancora is a tiny beach town very close to the Ecuadorian border. If you get your map out (which you won´t), the nearest big town in Tumbes. Now that you´re nicely orientated (at least those of you who got their maps out are), we can proceed.

We arrived from Trujillo in the very wee hours of the morning (about 5am), and took a moto-taxi to a hostel at the end of the beach. Moto-taxis are small motorbikes that have had two wheels welded to the back thus allowing to passengers to sit in comfort (and absolute fear). They are everywhere in Mancora, and by far the cheapest and easiest way of getting anywhere. Often they are driven by young children. Anyway, so after taking a tiny beach road through some fields, we arrived at the Point Hostel, located about 2kms down from the main beach, on the ¨Beach of Love¨(oooh). However, we arrived at about 5:30am, and no one could guarantee us a room until 1pm. So we did what anyone would do: we went to sleep in the Hostel´s bar.

When we woke up at around 9am, we decided to walk down the beach towards town to try and find alternative accomodation. After deciding on a place in the town, which was nothing more than alright (there was no urine anywhere in the room, and nothing had died in it recently, so it passed the test). While making our way back to the hostel along a dirt road, we wandered onto someone´s property, and noticed some bamboo cabanas down near the beach. They looked rather nice - the sort of place that would cost a fortune, so when we asked the owner the price, it was mostly out of mere curiosity. However, as it turns out, he let us stay in the bungalow (which sleeps 5) for the same price as we would have paid in a dorm room in the hostel. Score! The bungalow was made of bamboo (like the internet cafe), but had some really comfy beds, lots of space, a large bathroom with a semi-outside (yet private) shower, and a patio with chairs and a hammock. The best part was that it was on the beach. Step off the patio and your feet are sandy. Walk a few steps further and your feet are wet (and salty). Step a few steps further and, without previous swimming training, you will have drowned. You get the picture. Elated at our bargain accomodation, we settled ourselves in, before heading to the beach to have a celebratory rice and seafood in the sand (the food was not in the sand, we were).

That afternoon we decided to stock up on some fruit, so we hit the local market. We stood out at the local market. However, we emerged unharmed with a pineapple, some naartjies, some apples, some limes, some rum, some sugar, and some other random stuff. That afternoon we made our own mojitos (sans mint, although an old winkly man with dried mint promised to get me some of the fresh stuff, he turned out to be a damn dirty liar), and chilled out in the hammock, watching a great sunset. That evening we had a really awful dinner of cheese sandwich and half frozen hamburger. Afterwards we ventured to the Point hostel to meet some folk and have a drink at the bar (the very same bar we had slept in just that morning). After being told not to walk on the beach at night, we walked on the beach at night. We did this because it was only a matter of 100m to our bungalow, and it was the only way of getting home. Besides, as an Aussie in the bar put it, the next day´s newspaper headline would have read ¨Group of Peruvians mugged by two South Africans¨.

Instead of telling you what we´ve done day by day, I´d rather just tell you how we have generally been spending the days, because we´ve pretty much done the same thing everyday. At about 8am, we get up and go for a long walk on the beach (I swim in the middle of our walk). After that we return home and eat fruit (I cut the fruit up in an overtly masculine way using my Leatherman), before we head to town or chill out in the hammock. After that we head to our lunch restaurant (which is also our dinner restaurant - you will soon understand why). Firstly, I should clarify that ¨restaurant¨ does not mean a place where tuxedoed waiters named Wilfred serve you while a piano player plays Beethoven at the perfect volume in the background. This restaurant is not even indoors, its on one of the many dirt roads near the beach, and if you´re lucky, you get sprayed with dirty puddle water everytime a moto-taxi dodges a stray dog and almost runs you over. Why would we frequent such an establishment, I hear you ask? Well, the food is great, and it might just be The Cheapest Restaurant in the Entire Universe. They do not have a traditional menu with prices, just a chalkboard outside with their set menu choices, and a price of 5 Soles. 5 soles is about R12, and for that you get a fresh juice, a plate of ceviche to start, and a second course of Langostine Stir Fry. We almost feel bad eating there, because it feels like we are stealing. However, last night we stupidly ate there after they told us we´d be getting the last of the seafood. Thinking this was a good thing and that we were lucky, we ate our meal, which gave Nadia a rather bad stomach. Apart from that incident, the food has been great there, and although the ambiaaance is nothing special, I´m pretty sure we will never again eat langostines for under R10 again.

After lunch, we wait another hour for the heat to subside slightly before we head to the beach. However, by this time, the wind has picked up, and the beach becomes unpleasant, so we head up the beach to the section in front of our bungalow, which is more sheltered, where we dilligently lie in the sun and pass the time by reading, writing, learning spanish, and eating fruit. At sunset we drink a mojito and marvel at our surroundings. Then we slap ourselves repeatedly to make sure we are not dreaming. After the slapping, it is generally dinner time, so we return to our restaurant and after the meal, we slap ourselves some more when we realise we are living in paradise for a total of R140 a day. We repeat this cycle daily, and it doesn´t get old. However, one night we were, believe it or not, sick of eating cheap langostines, so we decided to splash out (something is wrong when you have to splash out to not eat really fresh and amazing seafood), and go to a grill house in town, where we satisfied our craving for red meat (Argentina gave us a carnivorous disposition which we cannot seem to get rid of). The other exception to our daily routine was that I surfed yesterday (my tattoo has healed), but was disappointed by the quality of the wave here and the fact that there are 25 people all fighting for the same wave. Peruvians seem to lack basic surfing manners.

Mancora is a rather special place. For starters, the weather is the best you´re likely to find in Peru. This may have something to do with its proximity to Ecuador, and thus the Ecuator (they mean the same thing in Spanish), and the fact that Mancora is at the edge of a semi coastal desert, and so has almost constant sunshine. Although this amazing weather does attract the fair share of visitors, somehow Mancora has managed to retain all its rustic charm. The roads all around the town (apart from the main road) are all quiet dirt roads lined with palm and bannana trees, where you can see locals riding their horses home at sunset and hear them say slightly rude things about you after you pass them. All the places on the beach, whether they are luxury B&Bs, or someone´s house, look the same - they are made of bamboo and have palm tree leaves on top of their rooves (is that how you spell the plural of roof?). Mancora seems like the kind of place where you could buy a large beach plot for very little money, and pretty much do whatever you want with it. Watching the sea for a while gives you a clue as to why seafood might be so cheap. All around, for as far as you can see, are various seabirds (of which the huge pelicans are the most striking) are literally having the time of their lives by divebombing the fish from high up in the air. They are all very well-fed birds. The locals in the town seem to share in this natural abundance, and have the kind of chilled out attitude that comes from not having to worry about too much.

Those are some random reflections of Mancora, which can hopefully give you an idea of the place. If it sounds nice, its because it is. However, despite it being like a paradise, we are moving on tonight, hitting the road once more, since we have many places to see in the next 2 months, and some ground to cover before we get to the Carribean coast at the top of this continent. If we stayed here longer we would be in danger of getting stuck here and not returning, slowly becoming coastal Peruvians. So at midnight tonight we board a bus headed for the frontera, and cross into Ecuador, headed for Montañita.

Until then,

Chau

Check out more pics at http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/steveo.zogg/Mancora

To the sea!: Lima and Huanchaco

Hey hey!

Well the comments flowed in like a fine wine, and thus I have been motivated to write again! We are currently in a small hospedaje in Huanchaco, a tiny surfing/fishing (the fishing feeds the surfers), town on the North Coast of Peru. But first things first...

From Cusco, Nads an I got on a bus headed for the capital city, Lima, on the coast. On the map, it seemed like it wouldn´t be a terribly long bus ride, but alas, it was a terribly long bus ride. We set off in the early evening in Cusco, only to arrive, in the early evening, 23 hours later, in Lima.

We had heard that central Lima was shite, so we decided to stay in an area called Miraflores, a wealthy Camps Bay type area on the cliffs overlooking the sea. We found a small hostel in a good location and got settled in. We had heard such bad things about the capital that we had planned only to stay as long as we needed to sort out administrative issues (yes, we too deal with these), but after walking around Miraflores for a while, we began to enjoy it rather a lot. You´d forgive us for thinking it was going to be crap - there are 8 million people living there, most of whom live in squalour and enjoy smoking crack and stabbing each other on a saturday night (Amy Winehouse has a holiday home here); added to that it is a huge, dirty, smelly city. But not Miraflores, a suburb which shines like a beacon of light in a place without lights, or beacons. A place filled with nice little seafood restaurants with fantastic views of the Pacific Ocean, over which troops of paragliders show off to the joggers and cyclists on the roads hugging the coastal cliffs. I´m getting too poetic about Miraflores.

We enjoyed it though. Most of all, it was great to finally be out of the dizzying heights of the Andes - the sensation of breathing normally was a new and refreshing experience. We also enjoyed all the conveniences and luxuries of being in such a large city - cheap taxis, easy to catch busses, good cheap restaurants, and a huge shopping mall built into the side of a cliff overlooking the sea. The mall is under the streets, and literally built into the side of the cliff. After all the rural towns of the Bolivian altiplano, and the nastyness of La Paz, we were quite happy to experience some familiarity in the form of a mall. This may sound silly, but after so much unfamiliarity, a KFC burger and the new batman movie was a great remedy.

In between enjoying Miraflores and nearby Barranco, we managed to complete our boring administrative tasks, which included seeing some travel agents about how we were going to get to cuba and manage to get back to Sao Paulo to catch our flight home, and inquiring about tourist visas from the Cuban Embassy. The latter was an easy task, and the important man with the moustache said all we needed were passports (non-US), onward flights, accomodation, and some good old anti-George Bush sentiment. The first task, however, proved rather difficult. Although a travel agent found us reasonably priced flights from Colombia to Cuba and then from Cuba to Sao Paulo, and told us everything was fine, when we trekked there again the next day to book the flights, she told us there was no availability at all, as if we had only been inquiring for the sake of research. Anyway, after a tough day of deciding whether or not to go to Cuba, since we would now have to pay a small fortune to get there because of silly Colombian air taxes (the taxes alone are $200!), we decided that it would probably not be worth it. The next day we booked a ticket to Havana. We decided that we would probably not get another chance to see Cuba as it is now, and that it was indeed worth the money, since we were so close anyway. So we are now the holders of two tickets to Havana! I have phoned Castro and he has insisted on putting the Havana Club Rum on ice, and readying the Cohibas by rolling them between his thighs. I am not so excited about Fidel´s thigh sweat, but hey, when in Rome.

After a few days, when we had sorted our issues out, and had had enough of the luxurious Miraflores, we decided to head on up the coast. Unfortunately for us, our timing was bad. As it turns out, all 8 million inhabitants of Lima had also decided to head up the coast that weekend, since it was the weekend of the 28th of July, Peru´s Independence Day. They take their independence quite seriously, and celebrate it by inhabiting the various small coastal towns for a few drunken days. While I don´t want to be a party pooper, and am happy for them (as I would have been in 1821), I was cursing their damn independence, since the bus stations were a nightmare, and all prices, including bus fares and accomodation everywhere, had doubled. After much hunting around in the bus companies of central Lima, we managed to get tickets for a reasonably priced bus to Trujillo, just a few kilometres from the seaside town of Huanchaco. The bus steamed ahead along the Panamerica (a glorious coastal highway which spans the entire Peruvian coastline), for 8 hours, and arrived early in the morning in Trujillo, which, we have discovered is a bit of a dump. Huanchaco, on the other hand, is rather nice.

We settled in to the chilled out vibes of Huanchaco in no time. We negotiated a good rate for our room, which has a TV in it and is nice and spacious, although the ¨hot shower¨is actually a ¨cold shower¨. Huanchaco itself is famous for fishing and surfing, and the seafood is as good as the waves, which yours truly has not been able to enjoy because of a healing tattoo. However, we have been enjoying the seafood tremendously, and have pretty much eaten the same thing every day, with no regrets. We have also eaten a lot of Ceviche, a delicious Peruvian speciality of uncooked fish marinated in lime and chilli (the acidity of the lime juice cooks the fish slightly). A typical Huanchaco day starts with a light run on the beach early in the morning (we have done this nearly everyday I´m proud to say), a small, cheap breakfast, followed by a stint of catching up on world news with CNN (mostly just about Obama´s bowel movements), after which we head to our lunchtime restaurant. The reason we have eaten the same thing at the same place will soon become clear. For a mere R23, you are given a large plate of Ceviche served with onions, another large plate of mixed seafood and rice - the seafood consists of whatever was found in the fisherman´s net that morning, and usually includes calamari, octopus, clams, urchins, and the occaisional shrimp, and to top it off you get a drink with it, all for R23! Our afternoons are often spent observing the locals on the beach. One interesting chap we encountered sat down on the sand, fully dressed in jeans and closed shoes and a jersey, and calmly proceeded to bury himself. No one else regarded this as strange, even when he covered his face with sand and flapped his arms around a bit. I think he even slept there that night. Otherwise our time is spent arguing with beach beggers, and watching surfers catch incredible waves which they ride for an eternity. One of the locals had a knee injury, and so decided to surf on his head. I´m not kidding, after catching the wave in the usual fashion, he does a headstand and rides the wave like that - its amazing. After our beach-time, we head back to our room, have a snack for dinner - usually 3 minute noodles (they do not yet have 2 minute noodle technology) and fight the urge to spend more money in town by watching a lot of tv. We are watching our budget very strictly in anticipation for expensive Cuba, and so we limit ourselves to $20 a day each, which gets us our room, our breakfast, our amazing lunch, our 3 minute noodles, and an ice cream (I have become strangely addicted to ice cream).

Yesterday, however, we decided not to be such lazy beach bums, and so we headed for Trujillo, where you can catch busses to the nearby pre-inca ruins. After a long and dangerous mission around Trujillo (a policeman insisted on escorting us part of the way because he said we had wandered into a really bad part of town), we got a bus to Huanca Luna. The bus bore a striking resemblance to an SA Taxi at rush hour, and was a kombi filled to the brim with locals, and the two Gringos. Huanca Luna is a huge pyramid temple discovered in 1981. Between two of these pyramids (the other is Huanca Sol), lies a large city, the capital of the Moche civilisation (500AD). The entire place lay hidden in a massive sand dune until it was discovered in 1981, and archaeologists have been excavating Huanca Luna since then. They have not yet moved on to the city, or to the larger temple of Huanca Sol, yet, and although you can see the ruins, they mostly lie hidden in the sand. Huanca Luna however was quite a site to explore. It was the main temple for the priests of the Moche civilisation, and was also where they carried out their numerous human sacrifices. Outside the pyramid is a large square, where the people of the city would gather and wait to see the priest´s bloody hands, a sign that poor Bob, or Joe (depending on who lost a competition (which included events of Twister, Monopoly, and a dance-off), had indeed been sacrificed. Each 100 years, the Moche filled in the huge temple, and built another one, just like it, on the floor above it. This has given the people excavating it an awful lot of work to do, and now visiting the temple allows you to see most of its layers, which show the progression of the Moche culture over time. The paint they used to paint pictures on the walls (mostly of God), was pretty sophisticated, and so the paintings remain in nearly perfect condition. All in all it was a very interesting exploration. Once the city itself, which is huge, and the other temple, has been excavated, the site will be staggeringly impressive.

After all that culture and history, we headed back to our haven of surfing and seafood and continued to focus on chilling out. We are getting quite good at it. However, there are many places to see, and a lot of ground to cover before the 19th of September, when we fly from Cartagena to Panama, and then to Havana. Thus, we must be on our way tonight, and continue up the Panamerica to Mancora, another seaside town near the Ecuadorian border.

Until then amigos,

Heres something to make you laugh: we discovered this sight in a local supermarket in Trujillo

Adios

Links to the other pics:

http://picasaweb.google.es/steveo.zogg/Lima

http://picasaweb.google.es/steveo.zogg/Huanchaco