You may remember from my Baños post (approximately 10,000 years ago) that Scott and I did NOT try guinea pig, or cuy, there, although we had the opportunity. This decision haunted us for about two months, as we found out that cuy elsewhere, instead of costing $3 for a plate, requires that you purchase an entire cuy for around 60 soles ($24 USD, aka outrageous!). So it was that with heavy hearts, we resigned ourselves to not trying cuy the way we didn´t try alpaca (Juancito told us that sometimes restaurants sell papaya-infused beef as ¨alpaca¨ - which I chalk up to the enzymes in papaya breaking down the meat and making it more tender, or more alpaca-y). However, word reached us of another place to try cuy - the nearby town of Tipon, famous for having water in its Incan ruins and for roasting guinea pigs. We wanted so much to try cuy that we skipped out on the cheap massages in Cusco and instead took an hour-long colectivo to a woman´s backyard in Tipon, where we finally gorged on this Andean delicacy.
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| Cuy! Cuy! Cuy! ...pick your own |
Side note: on a tour at Mitad del Mundo, our guide explained that families ¨grow¨ cuy in the house because the little buggers are experts at detecting earthquakes, and make an adorable little cooing or ¨cuy-ing¨ sound that lulls them to sleep. Hence, why they are called cuy. This explanation, of course, has led me to squeak ¨cuy cuy cuy cuy cuy¨ at the backs of tourists´ heads whenever I pass a menu with guinea pig listed.
Back to the story: before leaving for Tipon, Scott and I spent a half hour in the bus station, waiting to see if the Commonwealth Crew would meet us for cuy, and also to decide where we were going next. I advocated Arequipa, Scott wanted to go to the coast so we could go sandboarding. Now, it is a rare thing that Scott wants to spend extra money on something, so I left the decision up to him. Which took another half hour...
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| Cuy-face eating Scott-face |
Upon returning from Tipon, we were attacked with water balloons by the crew from the hostel, which I took to mean they were sad we were leaving. They also threatened to try and block buses to Ica (on the coast), which I also interpreted as ¨missing us already.¨
In the end, we boarded our bus with a discount (we´ve found discounts are easy to receive with a smile and a simple request), and 16 hours and several films later, we found ourselves among the giant sand dunes of the desertified Peruvian coast.
Ica & Huacachina
On our way to Ica, we passed through Nazca, which some enlightened readers may have heard of, since it´s the location of the famous Nazca lines (you´ll hear a little more about these later). Anyway, buses will often make one 10- to 15-minute stop way too late in the trip so that the people who needed something more than an
orinario can take care of their needs.On this particular bus, we stopped in Nazca. I asked the bus driver how long we´d be stopped, and passed on the ¨10 minutes¨ to Scott, who bolted for the restroom. Only about a minute later, as I was waiting patiently in my seat, I felt the bus begin to move. I rushed down to the exit - Scott was nowhere to be seen, and we were already pulling out onto the main road. The bus attendant - the one who´d lied to me - was standing nonchalantly at the exit, smiling faintly. Naturally, I screamed at him: ¨Mi hermano no esta aqui!¨ Fortunately for me, my shouting was sufficiently exciting for much of the bus to take up the cry, ¨Falta un tourista! Falta un tourista!¨ (¨We´re missing a tourist!¨). As though this happened all the time (which it probably did), the attendant calmly alerted the driver, and we stopped. As it turned out, faltaba
dos touristas - another frantic, sweating man jumped on with Scott, who was angry at me for having told him the stop was 10 minutes.
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| My cool picture: riding the dunes at sunset |
We arrived in Ica positively starving; we'd gotten on the bus at 8pm and had only had one package of soda crackers each before we fell asleep. Which was okay, since we'd been promised desayuno (breakfast). However, it was nearing 1pm, we weren't in Ica yet, and for breakfast we'd eaten the few packages of saltines that hadn't been eaten, but had slid to the back of the bus at our feet. It all changed when we got to Ica. Every passenger on the bus disembarked, hurried into a restaurant, and fed a real, sit-down meal. We endured the obnoxious conversation of a few other passengers, ate our lunch, then caught a taxi (we bargained, again) to Huacachina, a small town of 200, surrounded by enormous sand dunes and filled with expensive restaurants.
Huacachina, besides being known for having cheap hostels with swimming pools and incredibly slow internet, is the main location for sandboarding in Peru. Sandboarding is exactly what it sounds like: using either a snowboard or a piece of wood with stirrups, you navigate your way down heaving sand dunes in sweltering heat. Scott tried this on his own the first day, renting a terrible piece of wood for a few soles, then hiking to the top of a nearby dune. I tried as well, though with less success.
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| Scott´s cool picture: riding the dunes at sunset |
We realized early on that the food was exorbitantly expensive in this tiny town, so we took a nearby taxi into Ica for supplies, thinking that we could stock up for a few days. We asked the driver to take us to a "supermercado," and were rewarded with the largest, most Costco-like invention we'd seen in the country. The aptly-named Tottus (kind of like "titan," no?) took about half the day to walk through, even though we only bought bread, cheese, avocado, and bananas, because we were sidetracked by the in-house bakery. Prior to this, I'd been quite fond of a dessert called a "trufa," which is essentially a Ping Pong ball-sized chocolate ball, infused with rum, and doused in chocolate sauce. It is incredibly rich, dense, and satisfying, and costs about the equivalent of $0.20. In Tottus, however, the trufas were the size of tennis balls, but still only cost about $0.50...I inhaled one.
We did the sandboarding tour one of our days in Huacachina, which involved taking real snowboards (tablas professionales) out into the dunes via a wildly-driven dune buggy, then slip-sliding down the slope. Or, if you didn't know how to snowboard, you were always welcome to slide down on your stomach, which somehow seemed way more terrifying. Scott and I were the best in our group, and everyone was impressed with his 360s and ollies.
Nazca
To get from Nazca to Ica, we took our favorite bus company, Flores, which specializes in relatively comfortable buses at low prices, and seems to be the preferred company for Peruvians. We always feel smug when other tourists inform us they´ve taken Cruz del Sur, the exorbitantly expensive and (we suspect) not that much better bus company. We were full of Chifa (a strange food phenomenon where Chinese food is made with lots of MSG and makes you ill without fail) when we arrived in Nazca, and annoyed that the Flores attendant hadn´t dropped us off at the
mirador (lookout point) - we were too cheap to buy plane rides over the lines. For those of you unfamiliar with the
Nazca lines, some ancient civilization spent some undisclosed amount of time creating giant images in the desert. It´s fairly mysterious, since they wouldn´t have been able to see the figures in totality (since we assume they didn´t have planes), and it´s unclear why they did this in the first place. There are something like 36 figures - everything from frogs to snakes to a hand.
We caught a bus the next day back to the mirador, which was a 30-foot-tall rickety basket, from which it was possible to see the ¨hand¨ and ¨frog¨ images. Scott bought a key chain. We also walked down the incredibly hot highway in the desert to the natural ¨mirador¨ (hill), from which it was possible to see the other mirador in the distance.
The town of Nazca was fairly pleasant, and I was able to satisfy my Ring Lust by buying an incredibly cool, tiny, hand-made wire ring from a street vendor. We also discovered
pollo dorado, which is tender, delicious chicken with a rather teriyaki-type glaze. We got a discount to stay at a very nice hotel called ¨Las Tinajas,¨ in exchange for mentioning it to anyone who might stay in Nazca (it´s located at Calle Bolivar 400, telf: 056-523675, www.hotellastinijas.com). Bet Luis, the proprietor, didn´t even dream his hotel would make it into my blog...deal fulfilled.
Chala
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| one of these heads is not like the others |
Scott was absolutely ecstatic about working our way down the Peruvian coast, so confident was he that we´d find surfboards. Visions of perfect curling waves and 30-second-long surfing videos danced in his head as we took a colectivo the two hours south of Nazca to Chala, which we´d picked because it was one of two towns marked between Nazca and Arequipa on our Lonely Planet map (the other was Camana, where we stayed the next day).
We arrived in the evening to begin our exhausting search for a place to stay, and were shocked to encounter unfriendly faces and discrimination in the dusty town. Several hostels claimed they had no rooms available - between dark and furtive looks - though the many keys hanging unused behind the reception desk suggested otherwise. One woman with a harsh laugh told Scott he looked like
leche (milk), then refused to speak to us further. We finally found a hotel, bought some wine and bananas, and locked ourselves in our room to hide our strange white skin from the locals.
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| Chalans enthralled by the sight of an empty highway |
Our most viable theory is that we´d finally gotten off the Gringo Trail, of which we should have been excited and proud. Essentially, being off the Gringo Trail (a name for all towns recognized by Lonely Planet, and therefore automatically inundated with gringos) means that the local people have not yet come to comprehend you as a potential source of monies. It should have meant respite that not every Peruvian started salivating when we ambled past their choclo/banana/headband stand, hands clenched protectively on our (unbeknownst to them, incredibly light) wallets.
The main purpose of heading to the coast, of course, was for surfing, and so we awoke the next morning in Chala with high hopes, which were soon dashed. The Panamericana highway runs directly through the center of town, and in the morning, we were a bit nonplussed to find every one of the few thousand inhabitants lined up along both sides of the highway, their eyes trained upon the broiling asphalt. No one answered our questions as to the strange arrangement of spectators until a policeman blew a whistle several times, shooing the few people in the highway towards the edges. Not more than thirty seconds later, a race car zoomed through the town, its engine revving and wheels screaming.
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| Chala beach: mounds of trash not pictured |
There was some scattered applause, and a few appreciative ¨que rico¨s, but then the town settled back into comfortable silence. Five minutes later, another car rushed through. It turned out that the entire Panamericana was shut until a race - whose course led cars from Lima, through the mountains, and back up the coast in a several-hundred km speedway - finished that afternoon. We later met some Americans who´d just arrived in Lima, and their first bus ride - to Arequipa - was interrupted for four hours on a deserted stretch of mountain highway to let the race cars pass. It was just another perfect example of how we aren´t in America anymore...
The beach was gorgeous (once you got past the impossible amounts of trash piled on the slope between the city and the beach), but no one in town had ever seen a surfboard, and Scott was disappointed in his quest for wave time. We bathed languidly, then caught a bus South to Camana.
Camana
We arrived in Camana late that evening, and were dropped at an intersection we quickly deemed, ¨The Everything Corner,¨ since it featured cheap menus, a cake shop, bus companies, an internet cafe, and a fruit shop. We visited about eight hostels before deciding on one, delighted as we were by the amiable hotelkeepers, who not only did not insult Scott´s skin color, but also were perfectly jovial when we told them we would continue looking. At the cake shop that night, the cake girl (who was, for whatever reason, unduly impressed with our Spanish) broke the news to Scott that there were no surfboards in this town either, and his best bet would be to travel to Arequipa (4 hours from the coast), find a board there (for the people who don´t need water to surf....you know the type), and return to some other coastal town, since she was unsure about the quality of Camana´s waves.
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| Eyeless pelican and tomato, after we chased buzzards away |
The next morning, undaunted, we set out for the beach, after a quick visit to the Everything Corner. We walked perpedicular to the Panamericana for a while, then were told we´d need to backtrack. Strangely, people seemed to have trouble answering the rather simple question of where to find the beach.
About 45 minutes, three packs of oreos, and one Kola Real later, we finally found ourselves on a narrow, rocky, steep, secluded beach at the end of a cow track. Apparently, Camana does not value easy beach access. The beach cover, too, was not sandy, and instead featured onion-sized stones intermixed with thousands of actual onions. We took the opportunity to play Onion Home Run Derby, and hit a few of the fragrant ¨baseballs¨ with gusto.
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| Meet the only resident of Puntas |
Wandering South down the beach, we encountered more meal fare - a pair of fisherman with a thick rope winding its way out to sea squatted amidst tomatoes, crabs, and a huge dead pelican. Scott put a tomato in the dead pelican´s eyeless socket.
We made our way finally to the pueblito of Puntas, a ghost-town that was ravaged by a tsunami in 2007, and which has never been reinhabited, it would appear, except by one exceptionally forlorn penguin (!), trapped on a wooden board over a gas barrel filled with water. Odd, certainly.
Hot, tired, sunburnt, and exhausted from the aimlessness of our wandering, we were glad of the respite on the bus we caught to Arequipa, munching delicious Camana finger-breads the whole way.
