Peru´s coast is a desert!

Hello hello from the white city (no not Minas Tirith you Lord of the Rings geeks) of Arequipa in southern Peru. Arequipa is Peru´s second largest city (750,000ish) nestled beside some big volcanoes in the southern part of Peru´s highlands. It´s kind of like the Cuenca (Ecuador) of Peru. It´s the colonial gem of the country. The streets are narrow and paved with stones. There´s a river that runs along a pretty park right by our hostel, and wonderful views of the volcanoes from all over. The city gets it´s name because all the buildings are white (isn´t that interesting!). No but seriously they are all made of white volcanic stone, very poroussy (is that a word?). We arrived here at the wee hours last night after a long and somewhat comfortable bus ride from the coastal desert town of Ica. The road from Ica winds through desert until maybe 6 or 7 hours in when you pop out along the ocean. Which looked splendid as the sun went down over it. Why is the sun setting light glinting off water so damn beautiful? From the ocean we began winding up towards the highlands (Arequipa is at 2600m). Maybe four hours from Arequipa the bus stopped and I woke up slowly. Red and orange light flickered up around the bend. "Dude there´s a fire up there." Andrew said. Did I mention I´m with Andrew now? Oh it´s unimportant I just happened to run in to him. Anyway there was a fire up ahead where the road bended behind a hill. To the left of our bus was a herd of people with backpacks or sacks, shivering in the cold, watching the flames get bigger. They were getting bigger. Finally the fire department showed up and an hour or so later we rolled by an empty, charred and smoking bus---presumambly the bus rolled and started on fire, it looked like everybody survived but scary. I can´t say I was really surprised though. This is the nature of travel in south america. We got to Arequipa late, snagged a cabby, found a hostel, ate a mango and crashed til late this morning.

Now. Before that we were in Ica. Or a tiny town outside of Ica. The entire (or a heck of a lot of it) coast of Peru is a desert. A frigging desert! I had no idea! You don´t really get that sense in Lima because of the whole city thing, and the sheer cliffs that drop off into the ocean but it really is desert. We traveled to this tiny oasis town just outside of Ica called Huacachina. It´s a tourist town with a tiny lagoon in the middle of it. Sand dunes tower over all around the tiny lagoon town, and just about every hostel or hotel has a swimming pool. It´s a bit of a tourist trap, everything costs more--but--it´s totally worth it to see the dunes. Andrew and I rented one "sandboard" and went tromping around the dunes with t-shirts tied around our heads. We felt like some badasses. The desert is a really unforgiving environment. It´s really slow going walking anywhere. It´s a bit like walking in heavy slushy snow. Your feet sink in so you have to take smaller steps and tread lightly. These dunes were not small either. They were like mini Tyrol basin hills of sand (for those non-wisconsin readers, Tryol Basin is a tiny ski hill outside of madison that is...small but for a sand dune would be really big!). We trudged up these dunes, sand in our shoes, sandy-wind whipping us the face. It was fun. We took turns riding down on this sand board, snowboard style. Neither one of us went more than three times cause it took so much energy to trudge back up the hill. I fell on my buttocks once so hard I felt like pooping (do you know that feeling? you do, I know you do). We then trudged up the biggest dune we could find to see what was on the other side (that´s what it´s always about...what´s on the other side) and what we saw was a tiny ramshackle town right below us and then Ica stretching out to the east and nothing but desert to the west. What´s weird about Ica and some of the surrounding town´s is that they are green. Weirdly enough the southern coast is grape country. So driving along through desert all of a sudden a couple acres of vineyards will pop up...and then desert. Andrew and I mucked around on top of this dune for a while then sat down and watched the sun set over the desert to the west while drinking boxed wine and snacking on rasins and almonds. Against all of Andrews complaints and misgivings I insisted that we ride tandem style on the board down the massive dune. It´s just like sledding back home, I said. It worked. We moved slow, then fast, then sunk into the sand, readjusted then moved quick again. We went back to our hostel jumped in the pool and snacked on crackers and bananas for dinner. Good fun.

I can keep going...we spent a week in Lima before the sand dune business. I arrived on monday afternoon and Andrew arrived late that night. We spent the week wandering the barrios of Lima, Miraflores, San Isidro, Barranco, and the downtown. We stayed in Miraflores. Which felt totally different than any of the rest of the trip. It was a bit like being at home again, in a big city on the ocean. Miraflores is the rich business suburb of Lima where one can shop at a wholefoods look-a-like, get their fast food fix, and walk along a pretty malecón and watch joggers, people walking their dogs, and skateboarders on top of cliffs that plunge into the pacific. The downtown district is much more "southamerican." Streets are crowded and dirty, and cabs and small colectivos (little vans) honk at you and pull out in front of each other. There is also a sizable china town. The big event of the weekend for Andrew and I was the bullfight. Yes a bullfight. Lima is one of the few southamerican cities to still hold these colonial antiquities. I think because Lima was the viceroyality of all southamerica and the main port for the spanish to explore, decimate, and be all around cruel. The stadium itself, the Plaza Acho is a piece of history, built in 1750 for bullfights and still used for them today. The stadium is small, and there isn´t a bad seat in the house (that is you can see really well from everywhere). We, Andrew, the Cash bros (Nate and Drew) sat in the upper deck in the last row behind a couple of french ex-pats who in between swigs of pisco from an Inca Cola bottle attempted to teach us a few things about bullfighting. Everything I knew I had gleaned from wikipedia and Hemingway´s "The Sun also rises." Suffice to say I didn´t know much. I guess here like in the guniea pig story I will spare some of the details. The matadors were imported from Spain, Portugal, and France. They waved their red cape and came really really close to the bull, and at the end of the bull´s run they killed it. The french guys sitting in front of us kept telling us how lucky we were to see this caliber of bullfight. They were also very excited about the french bullfighter who seemed to get the closest to the bull and allowed him to make the closest passes. His last bull was so "good" some of the crowd wanted to save him. So they pleaded to the "presidential box" for the thumbs up for the bull (I swear this was straight out of Rome and the gladiators). I guess he got the thumbs down. The matadors were then carried out of the stadium on the shoulders of people, their gold and green suits sparkling under the lights. We went down and walked around the stadium after the crowds cleared and horsed around with the frenchmen for a while (they were quite drunk by this time). You can buy the bull meat on the way out. It took us forever to finally get a cab, and we payed him too much but we made it back to Miraflores. Nate and Drew treated us to the new Bond movie that night--which is set in the Atacames desert but really wasn´t that good of a movie. So I guess that´s it for now. Andrew and I have begun this portion of our "adventure." We will keep you updated.

---

---