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