Sunday, August 02, 2015

Las playas de Peru

We have dipped our toes in the eastern side of the Pacific in a few places in our trip, and our favourite came as a big surprise. The whole coastal plain of Peru is a pale sandy (and in large parts dusty) desert with intermittent rivers and oases. The dunes go right up to the coast, where there are endless lines of waves hitting the coast, a bit like the long beaches of WA. Everywhere there is a dusty haze, and fishermen, and tourist towns and surfers.

Paracas
A need for a reprieve from high altitude cool weather drew us into a road trip up the coast of peru. starting in Huachachina - a desert oasis full of backpackers on dune buggies. Normally not our thing but who can say no to a desert oasis ( we later found out is actually man made...) and sandboarding! 

 

It was fun zooming down the sand on snowboards, as the sunsets on beautiful massive sand dunes, and then finding pesto pasta (which for some reason we keep craving ever since they didn't feed it to us at la senda verde) to satisfy our post sand dune hunger. Next stop was Paracas, also known as the "poor mans galapagos", close to the Nazca lines and the Pisco desert dessert wine region. The coast was pretty cool, with lots of tourists from Lima  and local fishermen filling up the waterfront, but less of a tourist trap than Huacachina. We were staying close to the port, but snuck into one of the 5 star hotels to enjoy the pool and deck chair service for an afternoon.

 

The Islas Ballestas are an active guano mine. They are also a national park, but that just seems to mean they collect an entrance fee; every year all the islands are scraped for the guano, there are no visitor or boat limits,  and there are fences, sheds, docks and cranes all over the place. 
 
 
Nevertheless, there are still huge flocks of seabirds, plus plenty of sealions and penguins to make the trip worthwhile. The sea lions sit lazily on the rocks, next to the humboldt penguins and chillax. One of the birds is called "guanay", which is the Quechua name: turns out that we inherited the word from the Incans, which is pretty surprising because why would Europeans need others to each us how to talk s#&*? 
Also, they have pelicans without a big bulbous bucket-bill.
 

Lima
Friends we met told us to avoid Lima if at all possible, so we had very low expectations. But we found ourselves there to get a flight out to the Amazon, and we really enjoyed it or at least Miraflores, which is the only place we really explored. The beach is on a really grand scale, empty of boats and people, with a whole city perched admiring it from the cliff tops. Our hostel was the best we've found in our trip. The coffee and food options were really creative and good quality. It was our surprising favourite coastal "town".



We noticed a real admiration for Argentina from Lima people (and to a lesser extent the rest of Peru), which surprised because the history would suggest a bit of antipathy is expected: Lima predated and for a long time controlled the Argentinian colony. The liberator of Peru was Argentinian, but he abdicated in favour of a Venezuelan, who was then feted as the heroic figure who took charge of Peru after the revolution. Also, while Argentina has only a very small indigenous population after their brutal wars of ethnic cleansing Peru has a large vibrant indigenous population, that is also present in the capital city. But we observed lots of Buenos Aires references in street names and shop names, and some mimicry of the Argentinian accent, particularly pronouncing the "isc" sound. People generally supported Argentina, not Chile, in the Copa America final.

Huanchaco
One of the unexpected things about Peru is the surf culture, a product o mixing two different surf styles: American  (including Australian) clothing brands, jargon and equipment; and  Brazilian hair, attitude and Regaton tunes. In Peru there's also some indigenous elements which have been maintained including the traditional one-man reed surf skis which the fisherman take out every  morning.

 

We really wanted to try surfing here, and stayed in a beachfront hostel full of grungy Australians. The surf was consistently >2m as far as the eye could see, and breaking over a long time, onto gravel beaches. The only other people in the water were the fishermen, and that was mostly early in the morning. Unfortunately Sam injured his chest and shoulder helping to make a raft in the Amazon (see earlier blog), and couldn't move enough to make a surf feasible. We thought we'd give it a few days and try further up the coast in Mancora.


What we did get to see here was Chan Chan, a huge crumbling ruin of a city (one of the largest pre-Columbian cities in the Americas) that pre-dated the Incan empire. It was a regional kingdom (the Chimu) that covered most of northern Peru, building large irrigation and road systems to link rivers and oases across the desert. When the Incas came to conquer it, there was no real fighting: the Incas just blocked the irrigation channels and water supply. The Chimu king capitulated, he and all the aristocrats were allowed to keep their positions, but were forced to move to Cusco to carry out their functions. Their city of 60,000 people, including the vast adobe temple complex that was used to make offerings to the water god and therefore regulate the El Niño droughts,  was abandoned and left to crumble back into sand, mud and gravel. When the Spanish arrived the walls of the temple were still covered in hammered gold sheets, and had not been nicked by the Incas (perhaps for a fear of angering the water gods in a desert region).


 
 
 

Mancora
Mancora is the main beachside resort town for people from Lima. It is relaxed, friendly and everything takes place on the sand, in front of the main surf break. There is everything you might need for surfing available from every hostel, hotel and many surf shops; and when we were there, there were absolutely no waves at all. It was like going on a surf safari to Lake Burley Griffin.

We had a good time though, swam with some turtles (May got slapped on the arse by one), bought tuna straight from the fishing boats, and enjoyed the tranquillo beach atmosphere. We had the best waffles ever at Green Eggs and Ham cafe, while watching the water twinkle and turn. But after psyching ourselves up for surfing, it was a let-down to wake up every morning to see 20 cm waves struggling to make it to shore.


When the sun set over our Pacific excursions (literally), we decided to see where it was going, and followed it over the horizon to the Galápagos Islands.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home