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.