Lobitos

It´s a little different being a travelling surfer, rather that a regular gringo traveller. When you´re chasing waves and not tourist attractions, you find yourself in some pretty random places.

Take Lobitos for example - one of the best and most consistent waves in Peru, (though it was small the 2 days I was there) it is located in the shadow of an oil field. While the beach here is clean and the water clear by Peruvian standards, it really is one pretty ugly place otherwise. It was originally a BP oil field where a bunch of Brits lived and worked. Then about 10 years ago the Peruvians got a bit stressed out, sent in the army to kick out the poms and took over the operation of the oil field.

Since then, not one cent has been spent on the place, and the only people left living in town are travelling surfers who don´t own tents and a few extremely poor peruvians.

My travel companions head back from checking the surf to the dodgiest digs in Peru.

A typical building in town. Termites are finishing off what the looters left behind.

The waves break in the shadow of oil rigs....

The Longest Left

Behold: Chicama, Peru, the longest lefthand wave in the world.

I´d been surfing in Huanchaco for about a week and was just starting to get some paddling strength back when I heard a rumor that the swell was on its way up, and that Chicama might be working... So I packed my bags and headed north. And it was working - two days of headhigh, offshore perfect surf at the worlds longest left. It was freakish luck for me really considering it only works for a handful of days a year.

Its one incredible wave. There´s two main ´sections´ - both over 1 km long. The first (southern) section (called¨The Cape¨) is ´fairly´ long (1km or so), and the days I was there it was up to shoulder high or so, ranging from mushy to fast and wally along that 1 km, with no paddling required. You just jump off the rocks and the current sweeps you down the beach. If you don´t get any waves you drift that 1 km in about 20 minutes, so if you happen to jump off the rock during a lull and want to wait at the take off point for a wave, you better have some strong paddling arms boy. I just let myself drift.

At the very end of the south section the wave hits some shallow rocks - at low tide and with the swell small you have to paddle around these. (unless you want to walk back to the Cape again). With the drift helping you this takes about a minute. Then you´re sitting at ¨The Point¨ - the take off point for the second and better section.

A lucky lad heads for the point

The point is bigger, faster and more hollow with plenty of barrels on the bigger sets. It has a friendly take-off though, its very easy to paddle onto here - even for a kookus like me. The wave from here winds on down to the pier 1.6km away. Some sections are fat, some hollow and fast, its like 20 different waves all in one.

When I was there it was possible on some bigger waves to ride from the point to the pier on one wave - 1.6km in about three minutes. Though I didn't see anyone do it. The bigger and better section is the first half from the point, so most people just ride that, ride the whitewater to the beach, and then walk back to the point.

Here's a couple of pics I´ve done my best to stitch together on a very third world computer to show how long it is. Click on the photos to make them bigger....

Chicama MKI - The Cape to The Point

Chicama MKII - The Point to the Peir

Apparently in the odd freakish huge conditions the wave breaks from the Cape all the way through to the pier. The longest I managed to stand on my feet was a hundred metres or so, (I´m blaming my dodgy booties for exaggerating my kookiness.... but whatever....) but it doesn't matter if you fall off lots, you don't even need to paddle back out really, you just wait for the next wave and continue the ride.... awesome stuff.

The first surfer dudes

The trip has taken a new direction for me.... 3 days into a treck through the Cordillera Blanca at 4700m above sea level I had what a drunk would call ¨a moment of clarity¨ (apologies to Quentin Tarantino...) Maybe it was the thin mountain air affecting my brain, but I realised I could can my 30 day boat ride down the Amazon River and instead change a few flights, bus it to Lima, buy a surfboard and hang out on the beach for a few months. Knowing the worlds longest wave (Chicama) was only a few hours away was a powerful lure... The world´s longest wave or the world´s longest river... its a no-brainer really.

So lately I´ve been addressing the challenge of travelling solo with both and a guitar and a surfboard and a couple of backpacks too. So far its been surprisingly easy.

Having not surfed for a few months and adjusting to surfing on a shortboard for the first time, I thought I should look for some nice soft friendly waves to start out on. So I ended up in a small fishing village called Huanchaco, on Peru´s north coast, for no other reason than the long and mushy, but super consistent, surf.

Huanchaco Beach Scene

Turns out the place has some surfing history - the locals have been living and fishing here for some 2500 years, originally as part of the pre-Inca Chimu civilisation. They get their fish from nets which they cart out behind the surf on the back of these little reed kayak like things that they´ve been making for a very long time now. And get this - when they´re done fishing, they ride the waves back to the beach on the back of the kayak - the worlds first wave riders? this is a claim I know nothing about to back up, but I do know that 2500 years ago was a bloody long time ago, and I don´t think even Malibu's were around back then.







Fishing, like surfing, is all about positioning.... one of the locals paddles back to the take off spot.

Surfboards have come a long way since the Chimu started making reed boats.

This guy was pissed off. Up at the crack of dawn for a hard days fishing all morning, gets a good catch, rides a big one to the beach and then some pathetic little ankle high waves tips his boat over when he´s not looking. I bet the fish were happy though.

Only a little way from Huanchaco is the Chimu´s adobe (mud-brick) city of Chan Chan. This is where those fisher-surfers lived - in the worlds largest mud brick city, comprised of over 10,000 individual buildings. Most of it is crumbling very rapidly (mud bricks don´t last for long, and El Niño rainfall events havn´t helped lately). But some sections have been painstakingly rebuilt, mudbrick by mudbrick.

The old and the new - restoration in progress. It´s a little weird to see so much of the ruins completely rebuilt, rather than to see them in their original form, but then again if the Peruvians didn't do some restoration work there wouldn´t be anything left of this city in a little while.

The Cordillera Blanca

Peru is pretty famous for it´s mountainous terrain... One particularly speckky area is the Cordillera Blanca, which crams in 50 mountains over 5700m high into a 180km long range - thats 50 mountains taller than any in Europe. This includes the second highest mountain in South America and scene of the Touching the Void movie....

Having seen the movie I wasnt about to try to climb to the top of any of these mammoth rocks but I did take a 4 day walk around of a few of them, and have to say I felt very very small. Hopefully the photos will describe this better than I could.

The peak on the right here is Alpamayo - a very famous mountain in mountaineering circles. Though I´ve got to admit I´d never heard of it before. It was voted as the world´s most beautiful mountain by UNESCO, a bunch of people that obviously know much more about mountains than I do - though how they came up with that is anybodys guess. In any case the Peruvians are quite proud of their mountains, and this one in particular.

I was a bit surprised to see so much livestock rearing throughout what is probably Peru´s most famous National Park. Cows, horses, llamas, donkeys etc are all over the place, and theres apparently nothing done to minimise this . I guess National Park management is very different in Peru, the guide I spoke to thought that all these large animals were very important to the ecology of the area, as they are the food source for a whole range of wild animals - condors, pumas, bears etc.

Wild Bonsai plants. Crazy.

The Road to Machu Picchu

Machu Picchu is a must see destination for most South American travellers - The mountaintop city of the Incas was a home away from home for the Inca elite, but was abandoned by the Inca on the arrival of the Spanish. Unlike most other Inca sites, the site was undiscovered, and hence not destroyed, by the Spanish. While the local Quechuas always knew about it, Machu Picchu remained unknown the the rest of the world until 1911.

Nowadays though the site has become so popular that it has of course become really expensive - the train to the site alone costs $150US, an incredible amount for Peru, where you can live comfortably for $10 a day. Although the officials will never tell you this, there is a cheap way to get there - its called walking the train tracks.

It only costs 8hrs and some stiff legs each way...




There were plenty of other cheap skates to enjoy the walk with... and it was a very scenic walk too.














At the end of the tracks - the town of Agua Calientes, which has sprung up to meet the demands of thousands of tourists a day.... It is in a fairly precarious position though (check that photo on the left...) 2 years ago a landslide killed eleven people. One of the days I was there, emergency sirens started blaring and then the locals started screaming and running up hill away from the river, with very genuine fear across their faces. I followed somewhat confused. This repeated itself three or four more times later over the next few hours. Turns out there had been a landslide slightly up river from the town and there were fears there would be a flash flood as a result. The river did rise, but not over it´s banks. Check the colour of the water in that other photo though... that´s not normal.

Above Agua Calientes there is a steep mountain you can climb (forget its name, but that's the one on the right) and get some pretty nice views of Machu Piccu - Albeit from a long way away.

Machu Piccu itself,as the early morning fog rises. (The big steep peak behind the ruins is called Huayna Picchu)

Some bloke and a Llama get their heads in the way of the view.

This is the view of the site from the top of Huayna Picchu....

There are various ruins scattered around (and on top of!) Huayna Picchu as well. Halfway down is a big cave, and inside the cave is the Temple of the Moon. Interestingly, the cave is totally protected from the rain and so the ruins there are in even better nick than most of the other spots.... so you can see just how great those Inca stone masons really were.

The Sacred Valley of the Incas

Prior to the Spanish arrival in the west of South America, Cuzco was the centre of the Inca Empire - the capital city if you like. Its located in the heart of the Sacred Valley of the Inca, the Urubamba River valley.

The Inca had their most impressive buildings there, and of course it was the first place the Spanish Invaders took over when they arrived with their guns and cavalry in 1533...
















The Spanish of course weren't quite happy with the temples etc that the Inca had built over the previous few centuries, so they knocked most of the buildings down, leaving only the original Inca stone foundations to construct their own new Spanish buildings on top. What remains now is a really interesting city with most of the original Inca street layout still intact, and some of the oldest and most interesting Spanish Colonial buildings in South America perched on top of these massive Inca stone blocks.

This building has some of the most impressive stone work I´ve seen - It was the Inca High Priest´s palace, and hence the most elaborate building the Inca built in Cuzco. I´d love to know how they managed to cut these stone blocks so perfectly (and so would everybody else), with each fitting together like a jigsaw puzzle. There´s no mortar or cement in use here, just well cut lumps of rock that don't move. These walls have survived a whole bunch of earthquakes over the last few hundred years and you still couldn´t slide a razor blade between them. The blocks in the wall in the photo above were cut in such a way that they display clearly the pattern of a puma, a snake and a condor, though unfortunately you can´t see that in the photo.

On the opposite side of the temple were large panels embedded with gold and jewels - though the Spaniards pulled those sections out long ago and filled in the gaps with their own style of wall building.

Around Cuzco are countless other ruins...

The local kids play in the shadows of the Inca Temples











Further on down the Valley is the Town of Ollantaytambo, which is surrounded by mountains littered with Inca buildings, terraces and fortresses. This was the only place the Spanish lost a major battle with the Inca.

Other views of Ollantaytambo.....