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Published: December 17th 2019
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Arriving in Mancora
Have I made the correct decision? In the midst of the crisis that has been gripping Chile, I had been also meaning to catch up on writing about a few of our latest South American adventures…I was also going to go on a hilarious diatribe about the parking guys that hang around Santiago parking lots, and then want you to tip them when they help you back up, although mostly you just look in your backup camera and try not to run them over (I can see you!!! Now please move!!!). With the current climate around inequality, perhaps it’s inappropriate to make fun of these guys…they’re not exactly from high society and they’re just trying to scrub out a few bucks…I feel bad too and often I don’t have change since I mostly use a credit card here, so I end up trying to park in parts of the lot as far away from these guys as possible. Although, on second thought, maybe that’s what I could complain about…not having change…and this is not my fault because Scotiabank Chile, you suck! It takes like three days to reset a PIN on your debit card…and you have to visit all those three days to do one step of
Casa Pia
Beachside convenience
the process…and then those jerks messed up on the third day and we had to do it all over again, and we haven’t really had time. So I can’t use my Chilean debit card…actually I don’t even have a debit card because they will only give us one for the account. My hard earned and rapidly devaluing pesos are being held hostage basically. And you can forget about customer service. Here is a brief summary of our first entry into a Scotiabank in Chile:
Steve and Stephanie: Hi, we are a young married couple with good incomes and are here to open a bank account and give you our business.
Banking representative: Well hello. We’ll be in touch in about 7-10 business days.
(Banking representative stares at us awkwardly, wonders why we’re still standing in their office).
End Scene
Anyway, I digress. Onto other things.
Back in simpler times, in this case, simpler times being mid-September 2019, when Chileans were happily celebrating a five day weekend for their birth of their country instead of looting and burning it (the holiday is called Fiestas Patrias or Dieciocho for the uninitiated, perhaps you can
Golden Hour
The girls and their grandparents read my last year’s post about that here:
https://www.travelblog.org/South-America/Chile/Santiago-Region/Vitacura/blog-1024001.html), Stephanie and I boarded a plane and jetted off to Northern Peru, to the beach town of Mancora, not far from the Ecuadorian border. Besides an angry and spiteful Maelle on the flight from Santiago to Lima (she kicked the guys seat enough in front of us that the guys wife yelled “POR FAVOR” at us…like look lady I’m trying my best here, Maelle can only be managed, not controlled), the journey was pretty smooth, and after picking up Steph’s parents in the Lima airport, we arrived in the middle of the Northern Peruvian desert at an airport called Talara, which was like a landing strip with a solitary building. And as we stopped briefly in the town to pick up supplies (Mancora has no large grocery stores, so we were told it was better to stop and do a big supply run before we got there), I did have one of those moments where I thought, was this the right vacation choice, as a cold desert wind blew across the deserted…well…desert. Here I am in the middle of nowhere, with a two and a four year old and my in-laws
Playa Pocitas
Child's play on the beach
who just flew from Vancouver to meet us. But as we made our way north from Talara (oil capital of Peru!) to Mancora, and a view of the ocean started to creep into our sight, my nerves began to settle a little. The area around there, if I had to compare it to something, was a lot like the badlands of Alberta around Drumheller (no dinosaur museums though), and similar to Alberta, the area is dotted with oil rigs. After a final stretch of road, a rough dirt patch just behind the row of houses beside the beach, we arrived at our destination, an Airbnb named Casa Pia on Playa Pocitas, the door opened and we were let in by the house caretaker. After a long day of traveling, we were excited as we walked in, and you could see directly through the house to the beach and the ocean. As I am generally the planner for vacations, there is a sense of relief when you arrive somewhere and know that you have made a good choice. From our house you could walk straight down about 10 stairs onto the beach and out to the ocean.
The next morning
Moko-taxi
Not pictured here, Maelle catching a few winks I awoke very early (thanks to the kids), but as they say, the early bird gets to see the breaching humpback whale, or at least that’s what I say in Mancora. A humpback whale and mother a few hundred yards out slowly passed in front of us and jumped out of the water…and this set up a week of watching whales and drinking pisco sours and eating fresh ceviche from our patio (made by the house cook – house cook you say, #sofancy, but vacation prices for a beachfront house and service in Northern Peru are quite affordable!). These days included a two hour display over lunch one day of a mother and baby slapping fins and jumping out of the water, probably no more than 100 meters out. The little town of Mancora, a bit of a gritty kinda backpackers surf town, was about a 15 minute mototaxi ride (or moko-taxi per Maelle) from Casa Pia, and the beach stretched from the town some 30 km down the coast. The moko-taxis were tiny, dirty, uncomfortable and smelled of two stroke, but were a super fun way to get around…Maelle somehow kept falling asleep in them. One of the best parts about the town was the food, with amazing tiraditos and tuna dishes costing about $10 CAD (these in Chile and Canada would have been $30-$40), with the top pick being a restaurant called Sirena D’Juan - . We spent most days enjoying the pool and wandering the beach, building giant sandcastles and then trying to protect them from the incoming tide…and after much exploring, we were on the nicest stretch of beach you could find there. I managed to get out and do some scuba diving on an abandoned oil platform, populated by giant sea lions, although this dive did not go well (the current was b-r-u-t-a-l, and for the first time ever scuba diving, I actually cut a dive short – it’d been about 3 years since I went diving anyway), but the follow-up one with giant turtles made up for the short-change on the first.
So while I was a bit trepidatious when we first landed, the week turned out great. We had to leave from a separate airport from the one we arrived in, about a three hour ride from Mancora in a town called Piura, and it was chance to get a look at some of the rest of the scenery in Northern Peru (and for Maelle to projectile vomit all over the van…ugh), but pretty cool to get a sense of the country, including an incredibly lush river valley on the Rio Chira where lots there is a lot of agriculture, which was in stark contrast to the desert surrounding it…and then it was back on to Santiago to enjoy the quickly approaching spring and what I am sure will be another sunny Chilean summer
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