Mancora
was essentially the exact same thing as Montanita (see earlier blog
entry where Hayley wasn´t too lazy to explain the subleties of a
cocaine-fueled South American beach party town, as I currently am). The
only significant difference was that Mancora looked like it had been
planted on top of a large-scale strip mining operation. Sitting
charmingly amidst a barren `Hills Have Eyes`-type landscape, Mancora is
recognized by Planet as `Peru`s worst-kept secret`.We spent the first night at a dumb hostel where the owner kept tricking us into thinking that there was either a public computer or a kitchen that we could use. After we agreed to stay there, she coyly revealed that there was a restaurant upstairs, and that we could ask them if we could use their kitchen. Sneaky. The public computer issue is still a mystery.
The next day, as Hayley began her food-poisoning-induced coma
prompted by the previous night´s disgusting soup of chicken feet and
fish eyes served at a discreet menu-restuarant located in the back of a
t-shirt shop, I searched the town for an alternate hostel that
absolutely had a kitchen and internet. We had already discovered that
the result of being Peru`s worst-kept-secret was inflated food prices on
everything that wasn`t ceviche (or cebiche; the town was divided on how
to spell it`s primary food). Consequently, we needed a kitchen (we
would later find out that the town didn´t sell anything that you could
cook... like pasta, or food). I finally found a hostel recommended to us by Planet, a bit removed from the main Pan-American drag. Although it was a little farther from the beach, it did have both a kitchen and two free computers. I was sold. I walked back to the dumb hostel, summoned Hayley from her stupor, tried to avoid the other hostel owner on the way out (unsuccessfully), and carried our stinky packs the quarter mile down the road to the Posada hostel, where we were let in by the Eegore-like housekeeper slash nightwatchman slash hayley-hand-and-face-kisser (I can`t figure out how to make an actual slash, sorry).
On the way to the hostel I was approached by several cocaine-vendors disguised as rickshaw drivers, who would walk up to me, say `taxi taxi` and then, without waiting for a response, offer `weed weed` or `cocccccaaaaaiiinnee` in their most convincing spanglish accent with apprarently no regard for the cops a mere ten feet away.
Anyway, the reason to go to Mancora is to surf, and when we
arrived at the beach after checking into the hostel I was supremely
dissappointed; Lake Tahoe has more waves than what we were greeted
with. After several conversations with local surfing lumaries
(including a Peruvian man who owned a surf shop and had lived in
Burlingame for 20 years working as a painter), I was convinced that the
much-anticipated swell that would generate waves would indeed generate
waves. After all, their information was from the internet.We spent that day doing something, then returned to the hostel to find that there was someone else sharing our dorm room with us. This was noteworthy because we had been unable to find dorm-style rooms for a couple weeks, and Hayley and I had been getting mild cabin-fever sharing the same room with exclusively one another. Our new companion was a stinky, lemur-like kid from Belgium who spoke French, was relatively uninteresting, and always traveled with a German guy who Hayley was absolutely convinced had the voice of a woman.
That night, in our attempt to avoid interacting with the stinker and the the squeaker, we practiced spanish. It would be the first and last time we would ever do this.
The next day, the waves started to pick up, and I went down to the beach to rent a surfboard. I rented an eight-foot funboard (thicker, with more foam than a typical epoxy-based board) in the morning, and paddled out to the small point-break style waves. The problem with a point-break is that there is really only room for one surfer on each wave, and the heirarchy of who has priority on each wave is determined by seniority and localism, although ignorance of surfing etiquette also helps get waves. Anyway, I sat squarely at the bottom of the seniority and ignorance heirarchy, and consequently had a difficult time edging my way into the line-up. I caught a few waves, and was amazed to find that the slow, perfectly curling lefts were incredibly easy to ride.
I went back out in the afternoon after the tide had come in, trading
my board for a smaller six foot six funboard. It was hell of fun. My
surfing confidence had returned and I was able to catch something like
ten waves, getting 20 second rides and even making a few little turns.
The beach setup itself was somewhat daunting by this time, as the rocky
point that created the waves´ shape was now covered by two to four feet
of water. Consequently, I had to move my location from directly next to
the rocky point, to actually hovering over the point as the waves broke
over the shallow rocks. It was so shallow that at times when I was
sitting on my board waiting for waves my feet would touch the rocks
underneath. Luckily I never crashed... |
| Sick Boy |
Other interesting things about Mancora:
-One
morning as I was walking into town to buy a cake (I found a decent cake
shop - not what I had become accustomed to in Ecuador, but cake
nonetheless), I heard a loud screetching sound on the freeway overpass
above me. I glanced up, and saw a flat-bed truck carrying dozens of
tanks of gas careening along the overpass. Attributing the screetching
to the roadwork that was being done on that section of the overpass, I
continued walking up the dirt road to the freeway that I would follow
into town, lost in thought.
When I was about 15 feet from the freeway, I looked
up again to see the truck swerve towards me and slam directly into the
front wall of the Cocopelli Hostel bordering the freeway 20 feet to the
right of where I was standing. The front of the truck was solidly
planted in the wall of the hostel as the driver got out dazed but
unharmed. I walked up to the freeway and looked at the guard rail from
where the truck had come. It was scratched and mangled, and I realized
that, had the guard rail broken, the truck would have plummeted from the
overpass to the exact place where I had been walking. As a crowd of
Peruanos gathered around the wreckage (there was apparently no need to
be concerned that the tanks of gas and the crushed truck would react
with eachother), and speculations about whether the driver had fallen
asleep or the brakes had gone out were offered, I solemnly considered this
chilling reminder of my own mortality.
-Walking down the main drag of Mancora one afternoon, Hayley and I noticed a familiar face on a semi-familiar body walking towards us. After some scrutiny, we realized that it was Mike, the kid who had been punched in the face in Cuenca, Ecuador (see Hayley´s entry). As he neared us, flanked by two pretty Peruvian girls and looking tan and confident, we realized that he too had seen us, and was trying not to acknowledge us. It was a particularly startling coincidence to see this kid, as he had told us that he was headed north through Ecuador (having already been in Peru) while we were on a southern trajectory from Ecuador. Nonetheless, there he was.
As our continual eye contact forced him to
acknowledge us, he offered a casaul Ïmagine seeing you guys again¨as he
continued past us into his new cool-kid persona. Confounded by this
snubbing, Hayley and I finally realized that the face-punch he had
received weeks before had completely removed his prominent mole, and
that this had triggered an entire personity renovation. He was tan,
stronger, cooler, and completely uninterested in interacting with anyone
who had know him in his pre-punch mole days.
-We also spotted Dorf, the Australian surf-bum whom
we had met in Montanita and jokingly suggested must also be its Peruvian
sister-city. Casually strolling down the Pan-American highway in
search of the perfect wave, I wouldn´t be surprised if Dorf still
thought he was in Montanita.
-One day as Hayley and I were enjoying a pleasant
ceviche lunch on the waterfront promenade overlooking the main beach, a
small gollum-like Peruvian man sat down in the empty seat at our table.
Having already consumed a few beers, we were entirely receptive to his
company and welcomed him to our gathering. After a few lame attempts at
convincing us to kitesurf, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a
folded-up piece of white paper. Furtively glancing around, he held the
paper next to me my leg below the white plastic table, and unfolded it
to reveal several rocks of crack. ¨50 soles¨ he suggested jovially, to
which I equally jovially declined.
He continued sitting with us for several minutes,
talking about crack rocks, surfing, kitesurfing, and the state of the
world (which we had recently been lectured about from an older
Ecuadorian man at the very same lunch - a lecture that covered
everything from the treatment of the indigneous peoples of Canada to
class inequalities in Peru), until a Serbian killer who coldly wouldn´t
bely the fact that he spoke spanish scared the gollum back into
seclusion. When we asked the Serbian killer spoke if he spoke english,
he responded with any equally-severe face that he did not.
-Although there weren´t many cheap food options in
the bourgeois town, we did discover the magical papa rellenos (filled
potatoes) that street vendors would sell for 1Sol (about 35 cents) each.
Filled with chicken and splayed open to be topped with your choice of
lettuce, onions, tomotoes, ketchup, mustard, mayonaise, or aji (hot
sauce), these delicacies provided the cornestone of my diet for the next
week.
-As we attempted to leave Mancora, we found
ourselves the victims of a second Peruvian scam after being in the
country for less than a week. After questioning the various bus
agencies in search of the cheapest ticket to the moutains of Huaraz, we
found one that offered cama seats (fully-reclining - cama means bed)
for 20 Soles less than its competitors. We immediately purchased the
tickets for this great offer, and returned to the hostel to pack our
things.
As we boarded the bus, we were shooed to the upper
level where the semi-cama seats were located, and were told that we did
not in fact have tickets for the cama beds. We had paid the exact same
price that every other agency had offered for the same product, tricked
into buying it from the Flores lady by her scummy false-advertising.
Thus, we began nursing our healthy grudge against
Peru, as visions of Ecuador danced through our heads and four-day-old
parasites danced through Hayley´s intestines...
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