Sorry everyone for taking so long with the blogg. We still dont have the camera so visually all we have are some videos. To summarize our recent movements; we spent our first three weeks in Màncora in the very north of Peru. It is a small beach town in the desert with lots of partying. We stayed there for christmas, new years, and my birthday. Then Camden left for Ecuador again to pick up Jenny while I headed to Cuzco (through Lima) to meet my best friend Joey. Camden arrived with Jenny a couple of days after. Joey left a week later and Will (Camden's best friend) arrived. Since then the four of us have found jobs in different bars and are living together in an apartment in the artsy side of town. Until a week and a half ago when we made the trip to Puno, a small town on the border of Bolivia and Lake Titicaca after a day on the lake we came to Arequipa in Southern Perù.
Màncora historically has very little to offer. Camden and I chose to stay there because it is purely beautiful and fun. Because it's a party town most people hang out on the beach by day drinking delicious natural smoothies and eating great street food like papa rellenas (a potato mashed, then meat and veggies mixed in, deep fried, then split open to make room for tomatoes onions and lettuce). At night you can stand on the beach and hear five different clubs blasting a different latino song, the waves crashing, and foreigners trying their broken spanish on the beautiful latina women. We ate fresh seafood, in the region's most popular dish the Ceviche, which differs greatly from the Mexican version. Rather than mainly shrimp, the ceviche here has an assortment of seafood, no tomato sauce, and often is accompanied with camote (like sweet potato) or something to balance the acid in the lime juice. I took advantage of the soft sand by takig a run at sunset most days. The first time I went I was determined to get away from the town and the reach of man. Màncora is situated in a strange very dry dessert, so on the left there were sandy mountains iluminated by the setting sun and on the right brlliant yellow orange and purple waves crashing over the flat sand leaving the sun's reflection there only broken by seashells and the indentations of my footsteps. When I reached my turn around point I ran into the water to cool off and my bathing suite string fell off. So afterward i ran to the top of the sand dune to find some kind of thread but when I reached the top I was shocked to find a laguna filled with about 200 flamengos. Màncora is dangerously fun and beautiful, It was a good start to Perù.
The day after my birthday Camden headed North to Ecuador and I South to Lima and from there to Cuzco to meet Joey. The bus ride from Màncora to Lima (the capital situated about halfway up the country on the coast) is supposed to be 18 hours. The first bad sign was that the bus arrived an hour late to pick us up. I said goodbye to my friends and got on board. The pan-american highway runs down the coast where it is flat. So the ride was smooth and i fell asleep easily next to a nice old woman. But when I woke up in the morning the bus was stopped, so I turned to the lady and asked what happened. She said 'oh nothing just some small engine trouble, we should be going soon.' I looked out the window and there was an enormous pool of oil underneath the bus, so big it actually surrounded a commercial bus. We waited. Then we got off and waited. It was cold out and we were in some ugly little town that smelled of old fish. I got back on to sleep, but soon awoke to shouting. The lady seated next to me and another one were shouting about a cell phone. Lady 2 was shouting that someone stole her phone, there was a large group of people surrounded around them eager for the entertainment. She started flayling out insults and threats, blaming anyone she could. Lady 1 launched herself onto lady two just as a teenager behind them decided this was a good time to punch his (what seemed to be) step dad. Kids were screaming and the fish was starting to make me sick. Just then the bus roared to life and the pile of people stopped instantly, looked around, then sat quietly in their seats. It's hard to say how wierd this really was especially because no one had slept very well and we had just spent SEVEN hours in this crap town. It turned out the bus wasn't actually fixed... it just made it to the town bus station where we got on another bus an hour later. by the time we made it to Lima I was about 7 hours late already and we hadn't even braved the traffic of a 10 million person city. As we pulled into the station I was positive that atleast one thing must be missing from my bag or that the whole thing some how dissapeared. So I was really pleased to see it intact, but when I grabbed it I realized it was completely soaked through and on top of that the fluid seemed to have come from a tank of dead fish. My friends picked me up and declined hugging me it was so bad. The bus was so late that I missed all buses to Cuzco, meaning Joey would have to wait for me there. Luckily my friend Javier gave me a room, I got to shower (after fish juice and 25 hours in a bus I was repulsive), and then he took me to a nice club with 8 of his most attractive female friends. We got in V.I.P. and free.... a nice finish to a horrible day.
The day after my birthday Camden headed North to Ecuador and I South to Lima and from there to Cuzco to meet Joey. The bus ride from Màncora to Lima (the capital situated about halfway up the country on the coast) is supposed to be 18 hours. The first bad sign was that the bus arrived an hour late to pick us up. I said goodbye to my friends and got on board. The pan-american highway runs down the coast where it is flat. So the ride was smooth and i fell asleep easily next to a nice old woman. But when I woke up in the morning the bus was stopped, so I turned to the lady and asked what happened. She said 'oh nothing just some small engine trouble, we should be going soon.' I looked out the window and there was an enormous pool of oil underneath the bus, so big it actually surrounded a commercial bus. We waited. Then we got off and waited. It was cold out and we were in some ugly little town that smelled of old fish. I got back on to sleep, but soon awoke to shouting. The lady seated next to me and another one were shouting about a cell phone. Lady 2 was shouting that someone stole her phone, there was a large group of people surrounded around them eager for the entertainment. She started flayling out insults and threats, blaming anyone she could. Lady 1 launched herself onto lady two just as a teenager behind them decided this was a good time to punch his (what seemed to be) step dad. Kids were screaming and the fish was starting to make me sick. Just then the bus roared to life and the pile of people stopped instantly, looked around, then sat quietly in their seats. It's hard to say how wierd this really was especially because no one had slept very well and we had just spent SEVEN hours in this crap town. It turned out the bus wasn't actually fixed... it just made it to the town bus station where we got on another bus an hour later. by the time we made it to Lima I was about 7 hours late already and we hadn't even braved the traffic of a 10 million person city. As we pulled into the station I was positive that atleast one thing must be missing from my bag or that the whole thing some how dissapeared. So I was really pleased to see it intact, but when I grabbed it I realized it was completely soaked through and on top of that the fluid seemed to have come from a tank of dead fish. My friends picked me up and declined hugging me it was so bad. The bus was so late that I missed all buses to Cuzco, meaning Joey would have to wait for me there. Luckily my friend Javier gave me a room, I got to shower (after fish juice and 25 hours in a bus I was repulsive), and then he took me to a nice club with 8 of his most attractive female friends. We got in V.I.P. and free.... a nice finish to a horrible day.
