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Published: March 18th 2007
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Mollendo
The Peruvian version of the Royle family (And they are not unusual) Now let me tell you about Mollendo:
Mollendo is the first beach resort that you come to when you travel west from Cusco/Arequipa and is on the coast: it is not on the typical gringo trail; the reason that I know this is after being there for 4 days we did not meet one other foreigner and when typing my travel blog now it is not on the drop down key when entering the place that I have been (sort it out travelblog):
After deciding that we could not yet bare to be parted from each other Anna and I just wanted to get to the beach and out of the altitude, cold and rain - I mean I may as well have been back home in Brum:
We caught the bus from Arequipa on a Friday and even though there were numerous buses we struggled to get a seat for an hour; that was a good sign we thought: after all we were going to the Peruvians holiday resort on a Friday in the main season:
Any good city in this world needs a sister city and I have decided to officially name Mollendo as Blackpool's
Mollendo
The random shadows that I was talking about - dont ask sister city: (Look at the luminous inflatables and it will all make sense)
On arriving in Mollendo there were stalls being erected; we had only arrived on their biggest celebration of the year; the towns birthday celebrations..........bonus so we thought, it was early evening when we arrived and the town was buzzing; food stalls on the street; people every where what more could you ask for? that night was relatively calm; while doing a recee of the area we met some random Chileans who were eventually going to turn into our shadows that we could not lose but this was the start of the Mollendo experience:
On rising in the morning there was only one thing to do, hit the beach of course: Who needs Brits abroad when you have Peruvians? I have never ever been to a beach resort like it.
The first thing that caught my attention was this Peruvian family who had a right setup. They had the biggest ghetto blaster I had ever seen, deck chairs, a sun umbrella (not sure why) and a paddling pool. Can you believe it? To top it off though they weren't unusual, the further we walked down
Mollendo
Buy a balloon just to add a bit of colour to the place! the beach the more of the same thing that we saw! I mean who comes to the beach to go in a paddling pool? I was crying with laughter.
You might think that this would mean that the Peruvians are a little behind the times compared to our standards but actually far from it, every few hundred metres there were David Hassalhoff type life saving stations that would have gave our Pamela a run for her money(who needs Baywatch). I tried taking a sneaky picture just to find one of the life guards lifting his shirt and flexing his six pack, I really thought now I have seen it all. As you can guess I hadn't. continuing down the beach it hit me, the Holmer Simpson like power station in the background, massive like a big bleat on the already not very nice scenery. This was concerning enough but when I looked at where the waves from the sea had left an aluminous scummy mark I had flash backs of Chi noble all over again (I promise you this is not an exaggeration).
Firstly the sand was nearly as black as the gloomy sky but it was hot,
Mollendo
A magnified version of the dead crab the only problem being that when you lay down on the sand it was hotter than the heat coming from the sky; it was like lying on an electric blanket. As you can imagine we didn’t particularly tan very easy, why I dont know as all the Peruvians had really bad sunburn. We soon put all this behind us and decided to make the best of it (We still came back the next 3 days running - I mean its still a beach ain’t it?). So after finding a nice little spot between all the dead decaying crabs we lay and giggled about our surroundings for the whole day while getting a heated half body wrap -Perfect!
Every evening we tried to avoid our new found Chilean friends without much joy, unfortunately Mollendo isn't the biggest place to hide so every time we bumped into them we just drank as much Vodka as we could and they soon became more bearable. The nicest one of the four of them just happened to be a mute! (Not joking and not meaning to be nasty)
On leaving Mollendo I was genuinely sad to leave, it had been the first
Mollendo
More dead crab.......it was everywhere place in Peru where I felt that everybody wasn't there to rip you off and that you had to look over your shoulder. Little did I know that this was going to turn out to be one of my fondest memories of Peru.......Even if it did look like a recent war had taken place with barbed wire and men doing century duty (I soon realised that we were next to a naval base after)
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Lisa Bx
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Blackpool??????????
Not being funny mate but Blackpool looks nicer! To start with there is no dead carcasses on the beach only used condoms at our northern beauty spot!!!!!