Huanchaco Life

---

Current Location: Still in Huanchaco, Peru. And getting harder to leave every day. I´m now here until new years day, at which point I will be forced to make the dash for Ecuador.

I´ve been doing a lot of reading the past few weeks. The selection is limited, but constantly changes as travelers bring in new books and take out the old. Mostly the books have been painfully-dull, forgettable mystery novels, seemingly favored by the majority of travelers in South America. (A strange phenomenon, echoed in every book exchange I have been to) That is until I read Marching Powder, by Rusty Young, a strangely awesome narrative about the authors time in the infamous San Pedro prison.

Significantly different from any other prison in the Americas, San Pedro is almost completely run by the prisoners. Due to severe shortages in funding, guard duties have been reduced down to only the outer-wall, the rest is its own small community. Inmates are responsible for purchasing spaces to live in one of the five distinct districts within the prison. (1 star level up to the 5 star, luxury areas.) Most have jobs inside the prison to pay for their ¨cells¨ doing everything from running restaurants to cutting hair. A weird set-up for a prison, but for years now it has maintained a fairly stable atmosphere.
The book chronicles the six years that Young spent in the prison, and he paints it as some of the best years of his life. I think mainly due to the excessively easy acess to drugs within the prison which are smuggled in, and out, by visiting families. (San Pedro produces a large amount of the cocain found in the La Paz area)

I guess I decided to update you all on my late readings because not much has changed since my last post. Christmas came and went much like any other day here in Huanchaco. Several other campers and I went to a near by restaurant and had a very nice vegetarian/curry dinner, accompanied by a dance performance. But that was about it.
Although we had planned on visiting Chan Chan on Christmas day, to avoid having to pay, we found that they actually have a gate at the entrance to the ruins to keep sneaky gringos like us out when no one is around. So we had to settle for going on the 26th, and dutifully paid the 25 sols for an hour long tour. Looking back on the tour I am glad that we did it, because otherwise we would not have known what we were looking at, it simply would have been a mass of mud rooms, and strange wall designs. I guess in the end we were rewarded for not breaking into the sacred ruins with better results, a little Christmas karma?

If my plans all come together Ill be leaving Huanchaco New Years day and heading to Cuenca for a short visit before making my way back to the coast, just this time in Ecuador.

Pictures of Chan Chan to come.

Brendan

---