Life´s a bitch. Then you die. Black hell.
Apologies, i´m sorry. Dont know what came over me there. Might have been that fish I had for lunch. Life is awesome-o!! Now where were we? As I rightly recall, one month ago was it (I´ve been quite preoccupied as of late), we were having a nice chat, I was in Piura, you were in a lovely flowery dress and we were discussing plans for the future. Our future.....But Ì´m just not ready to settle down and have a family yet and with my terrible shopping habits and you´re excessive drinking, my passion for extreme sports, your promiscuous tendencies, the miserable weather and the price of milk.....its just not going to work out. I still love you.
Anyways...and now look what you´ve made me do, I´ve lost my train of thought. Ah yes, penguins. So I got my gear together, said goodbye to Piura and took that midnight train going anywhere. Which funnily enough was going where i wanted to go....Pisco...three and a half hours south of Lima, on the coast, blue skies, nice beaches, where an earthquake last August measuring 8.0 on the richter scale completely destroyed the city leaving
many casualties and around 80,000 people without homes. When I arrived here, seven months after the incident the amount of damage done was still extremely evident, a big gaping hole in the cathedral on the plaza, quite a lot of rubble in places, many tents scattered around the city and funky smells of raw sewage.
The taxi driver knew automatically where to bring me, a big house beside the beach where all the volunteers live. The organization here is called Burners without Borders and the people in charge here are involved in organizing aspects of the Burning Man festival in Nevada. Tree hugging hippies? You betcha...and I´ve been one of them for the last month or so. Its been good fun so far since coming down. There´s many different reconstruction projects taking place in the city and I regularly find myself each day behind a sledge hammer, shovel, hammer drill etc. hammering the hell out of this or drilling the face off that, bending rebar, pouring concrete, digging holes, filling them back in and doing the odd bit of plumming. Not that I know anything about half of that stuff but have been learning quite a lot. I quite
Building BathroomsThis is a prototype, all purpose, shower, toilet, washing area unit. Since the main problem after the earthquake is sanitation the idea is build a load of these things for the locals which they can th
... [more]like the manual labourness of it all.
Working 8am till 6pm and am absolutley cream crackered after each day...but a lot of the people here are overly greatful for the help and will bring nice seafood and drinks to you while you work on their houses. And everyone on the street where we live will know your name and want to have the banter with you. Living conditions aren´t exactly the best though. Sanitation in Pisco is a major problem at the moment. We have proper medicine for when we get sick here unlike a lot of the people. However it seems at least two people fall foul of the dreaded ´Pisco Two Step´ each day which means that you cant manage to get two steps away from your toilet when you have it. Sorry, no more vulgarities. Its true though.
And what a diverse bunch of people working here too. Half the people here are veterans of the Burning Man festival, most of them being from California and will ask you
"Are you a burner? How many times have you burned?"
"What? my toast? Whatchoo talking about hippie?"
And they´re all into setting things on fire and
juggling them while the other half of us just like to sit down and have a beer.
But there are people from all walks of life here and lots of different countries. I was the token Irish guy here and some people had trouble understanding me until Paul, a fourty five year old carpenter from Coolock showed up. He was supposed to be here for two weeks and we were having a barbeque the afternoon he arrived. After a couple of beers there was no stopping this man and he was entertaining, offending and making no sense to all the people in the camp.
-"When was the last time ya got a good ride", he asks Sam , one of the project mangers down here
-"A riot. Im sorry I dont understand"
But he was off on a different tangent
-"Can we get some bleedin smoke round here man or wha?", trailing off towards the end then laughing manically to himself.
and here was me thinking these people dont travel
Well he stumbled out the door knocking everything over on his way out shouting
"Right, I´ll be back at 6.30 in the morning...ya better be buildin some fuckin proper
houses"
We never saw him again after that.
Then there´s another guy from England...six foot something...fourty years old...covered head to toe in tatoos and piecings...came all the way over to Peru to work in an orphenage...turned away funnily enough..."I dont believe it, I told him", who wont let his photo get taken (on the run perhaps), and sleeps in the bunk bed below me while I sleep with one eye open. ( I started writing this mail a week ago. Yesterday this fellow, Dominic lost half his ring finger in the new concrete mixer. Not a bother to him. He was back at work today laughing, giving hi four and a halfs to some and the finger, the intact one, to others.) He´s an interesting character.
Three and a half months I´ve been in Peru and still havnt left it or even seen half the place. I only have a few more days working here in Pisco. Its incredibly hard to leave anywhere in Peru as I have been finding. I have some good reasons to stay here now. I have however decided to move on to the next part of my journey now with a flight I
The Who, IcaWe´re not supposed to go out in Pisco as there were a few incidents in the Pisco Disco there, like when one guy got held up at knife point for his jumper and runners. This place in Ica is much more fr
... [more]bought last week to Colombia. I have a lot more things to write about but I´ll keep this short. I feel incredibly lucky to be doing the things I´m doing right now. I have an incling of an idea of what Im going to do when I get home. Its going to be something fun. And its going to be something worthwhile. For those of us who have a choice, life is too short and fragile to be stuck doing things that we don´t like.
So fuck yeah!! Vamos a Colombia. Travelling with some friends here from Pisco, a crazy French girl called Delphine and a girl from Galway, E. Gonna meet up with some friends from Cuzco there too as well as pop into see Murphs family in Cali. I´m also gonna take the plot and leave it in the airport in Bogota where it shall be nowhere to be found and if needs be I´ll pick it up on my return to Peru in a month. Safety third. No I´ll be on my best behaviour in Colombia, I really will.
Ok sexy pants, thats enough for today. I´ll write you soon from Colombia
Hasta la
Pasta
Ron
Peru's Flag
Map of Peru