Paracas

I talked to this guy Nic who is another student in my program from Madison. We decided on Wednesday night that we would meet up at La Catolica on Thursday morning and plan a weekend trip. Kat showed me how to get to La Catolica by bus on Wednesday morning because she had a Spanish class all week. It’s about a 5-10 min walk to the bus from my house and the bus takes about 15, costs 1 sole and drops us off right in front of the main gate at La Catolica. The school is completely surrounded by a huge cement wall like a lot of the houses. You have to have a student ID card to get onto school ground. I explored the campus for a while; it’s really pretty and big. There are all kinds of art sculptures and statues on the lawn and tons of deer just walking around. I met up with Nic and we went to the international office because he was put into a bad host family situation and wanted to get out of it. They found him another house right away so we moved his bags there and ate lunch with his new family.

Almost every meal we have some sort of chicken and rice dish. The food here is so amazing! There are so many things I have never tried before but all of it has been awesome. All of the juice is freshly prepared and probably the best thing I have ever tasted. We have pineapple, strawberry, and even juice made from black corn. The corn juice is made with a little bit of lemon and sugar, it is a very dark purple naturally and is just delicious! Another interesting food I had came wrapped in a corn husk, and was a cream colored paste. At first I thought it was going to be gross because it looked like oatmeal but it was a desert and had a caramel sauce in the middle.

Nic and I packed up our backpacks and headed to the train station with intentions to go to Pisco for the weekend. The bus cost 20 soles (not even $10) for a 3.5 hour ride down the Pan-American Highway. On the bus we drove by some of the worst poverty I have ever seen. Outside of Lima all along the coast are neighborhoods of "houses" made of random boards, paper, and woven together palm tree leaves etc. It was really sad to look at these places and try to imagine the people who have to live their whole lives like that. The bus dropped us off on the side of the highway and we had to find a way into Pisco. There was a taxi waiting there so we negotiated a price of 7 soles to take us to Pisco, which was for sure a rip off but we really didn’t have any other option other than walking. The taxi driver was really nice and suggested we go to Paracas (20 min away) because Pisco was more dangerous at night.

We took his advice and went to Paracas, found a tour agency and signed up for the morning tour of Las Islas Ballestas and an afternoon tour of a national park. The cost for both tours together was under $20. There was a hostel close by that we got a room at for under $15 each, got settled in and went out to tour Paracas.There wasn't much to see there because the whole area had been destroyed by an earthquake on Aug 15th, 2007. Paracas wasn't much nicer than the shack towns we had driven by. The only thing that keeps that city going is tourism. In the 10 small blocks that are the city 5 hostels can be found, 5 "nice" restaurants and numerous tourist agencies. There are stray dogs everywhere that just eat trash. They were breads I have never seen before, some were really cute but others were just scary and ugly. We saw a group of men carrier roosters that they had just been cockfighting. Those roosters kept me up all night because they were too retarded to know when it was morning.

In the morning we woke up at 6:30am, went and got a little food and met to take at 8am tour of the islands. By 8am all kinds of little stores were set up on the beach selling Peruvian goods. There was about 100 people waiting to take the 8am tour which was a lot more than we expected, naturally everything was very chaotic but we finally got on a boat with about 20 people. First they showed us part of the peninsula that has an ancient drawing of a cactus or something on it similar to the Nazca lines. There were all kinds of cool birds lining the cliffs on the coast. Then we went 11km out in the pacific to the islands. They had beautiful arches that the wind and water had carved out. The islands are known for their supply of guano which is the poop of one of Peru’s native birds. The guano is collected and sold as a very popular fertilizer. There is such high demand for guano that they have to regulate the collecting of it because the supply that has been building up for centuries is getting low and the population of birds is getting lower. It smelled like poop too. We also saw sea lions and dolphins swimming around. The tour was about 2 hours then we went back into shore.

We had an hour to kill between tours so we shopped around the tiendas (stores) at the market and bought some little things. We took a bus at 11:00am out to the national park about 30 min away. It was the desert, like everything in this area so it really wasn't that cool. The bus took us around to a couple interesting stops though. We saw flamingos, small lizards and some huge cliffs to the ocean. They had red sand beaches in some parts because the area is really rich in minerals like iron. Driving through the desert there were groups of animal bones everywhere. There was this place called "La Catedral" which was a cool arch carved out by the wind and sea but it was destroyed by the earthquake so we saw where it used to be. We stopped for an hour at a place w/ two restaurants in the park that of course were extremely over priced. I had a beer and some seafood/Chinese/rice/something. It was pretty good. Nic had fried fish with some attempt at French fries. The ketchup they have is was NOT ketchup but just some red liquid paste stuff that tasted horrible. The restaurants were cool though because they were right on the ocean, literally the waves came right up on these rocks the tables were sitting on. There was an otter and some pelicans playing in the water that we watched the whole time. We also met two cool guys from Italy, there was a huge language barrier but we went exploring around with them for a while.

After the park the bus took us back to Paracas and we were planning to go get a bus to Nazca that night. We took a taxi, and by taxi mean a random car driven by a friend of the tour guide to the Pan-American Highway. There was tons of people just waiting a long the highway for a bus to come, a few people would get off and everyone would try to push onto the bus. It was going to take forever, and it was getting dark so we crossed the road and got a ticked to go to Lima instead. Why they sell actual tickets to Lima and not to Nazca I have no idea. The bus rides are very scary. There are no rules on the roads of Peru. These coach busses would pass other busses, tucks and cars, usually numerous at a time. Once we passed two buses and a car, very scary. Also people flash their brights at other drivers like it’s their job so many of the drivers are probably blind to begin with. We got back to Lima and took a cab back to our houses and I was tried and went to bed.