little wolves.

We spent our last week in Peru with our new friend Andres, a friend of a friend living in Piura. Marlo and I camped out on his apartment floor for a few days before the three of us headed north to Lobitos, which will henceforth be known as the world's most beautiful former military base.

This place is essentially a ghost town: Peru only opened up the land to the public a few years ago, and the army barracks facing the water became Los Muelles Surf Camp... a line of tents, hose shower, and a vast view of the ocean. We have never been so content to live in a rickety, falling apart structure.

There was something quite poetic about how surf hippies came in and filled the place with peace and love paintings and left the army slogans up as well.

What is there to do in a ghost town? We wound our way past the "NO ENTRAR: TIERRA MILITAR" sign to spend a day on the quiet beach, all alone (Andres surfed a little, but I was too intimidated by the waves). We tried to fish off the dock at 2 am with a handful of beers and a few Spanish surfers. We read surf magazines by gas lamp and ate lots of fish at the one restaurant in town.

So essentially... we fell in love with Lobitos and will probably have dreams about it for a long time to come.

life's a beach.

A brief synopsis of what happened in Huanchaco:

1. Met an artist named Joan Louis on the beach, whose paintings have been exhibited on three continents, who got drunk on pina coladas and hit on my mom, and who became our new favorite Peruvian almost-famous person with the sweetest heart ever.

2. Saw the ruins of Chan Chan and Huaca Sol. We figured that seeing ancient Mochica and Chimu civilizations would make up for the fact that we wouldn't see Incan ruins in Machu Picchu. We were wrong. Not that the second largest adobe metropolis in the world and a couple of Unesco World Heritage sites are anything to scoff at, but HELLO, building in sand isn't as cool as building on the side of the Andes. Fact.

3. Favorite picture of the last four months: slightly drunk taxi driver. Absolute unawareness that he was in the way. Mom with Flat Stanley outside Arco Iris. Pure gold.

4. No peeing.

mamacitas

I cried on accident when we waved goodbye to my mom last night. Even though we couldn't go to Machu Picchu, we had a sweet week on the beach in Huanchaco, Trujillo: massages, surfing, ceviche, ancient Moche ruins, fresh fruit, and matching mani/pedis before she got on her plane.The north coast of Peru is a mellow paradise, we were lucky to spend her President's break thinking more about Keiko Fujimori than Abe Lincoln (may he rest in peace). I love any time I can spend with my sweet mom, especially on different continents. I miss her already!

parque de amor.

Massive statues of couples making out in public: classic South America.

foiled by mother nature!

Here's a cool site: Macchu Pichu NOT being rained on.













And here's my mama, traveling like a champ in Croatia and being super cute in general.






These two were supposed to meet next week. Mom has a ticket to Lima for Friday night and we were all set to do some hiking, see the continent's most famous ancient ruins, and add another country to our mother/daughter travel list. The day after we were going to buy our tickets to Cusco, the rains hit and Peru declared a state of emergency in our next travel stop.


Apparently, rainy season isn't something to joke around with here. Marlo and I are scrambling to come up with Plan B, which will most likely involve doing everything Mom and I do at home (yoga, going on walks, eating a lot and laughing) just... on the beach. Not that we're complaining. Macchu Pichu, we'll see you some other time...

i need more air quotes to tell this properly.

May I please plead the case that I am 100% Little Miss Cultural Relativism most of the time, but even when you can blend in fairly well with the language and lifestyle of a place, being North American comes with a mentality that doesn't always match that of our Southern compatriots. It doesn't mean that anyone is "right" or "wrong," we're just "different." And sometimes that gets a little "confusing."

I know what the word "work" is in Spanish, but that doesn't mean I know what people mean when they say it. So Marlo and I got "jobs" in Wayruro Hostel after chatting with the owners Julio and Jesus about their plans to open up a bar. A week ago, our understanding was that they wanted to repaint everything, design a menu, stock the bar (currently only filled with beer and what looks like a bottle of coca liquor older than I am), and have a party to celebrate Pisco Sour Day (Saturday), a day as big as the 4th of July for Peruvian-types.

This is when I first realized that for as much as people from the States complain about "deadlines," WE FREAKING LOVE THEM. We thrive on them. Marlo and I immediately perked up at the thought of throwing a killer Saturday night in a brand-new bar. We jumped behind a blender to practice our Pisco Sours, came up with a drinks list, designed a paint scheme, talked with their designer for a menu plan, and made mental notes about how much work we could accomplish before Saturday night. Who doesn't love a good project? Especially when it leaves you time to surf in the mornings?

We quickly realized that we weren't operating on South American time. By Thursday, when the designer still was only showing up sporadically and the paint we picked hadn't been bought, we asked Julio if Pisco Sour Day was a real thing or WHAT.

Us: "BTW, Julio, when you told us to invite people, we did. Lots of them."

Julio: "Shit."

He then went to yell at Jesus for telling the Americans to do things, "because then they actually do them! You can't talk to people from the States like you talk to people here."

OKAY! We are now officially going to REALLY TRY to start operating on South American time, which means that we'll be celebrating Pisco Sour Day roughly six weeks late.

riptides are nothing to joke about.

Pisco Sours: the most dangerous thing to come out of Peru since Shining Path guerrillas.

Ricardo and Omar, of the aforementioned sports television fame, did indeed take us to El Silencio yesterday for a day on the beach. This was a positive turn of events, because hanging out with grownups means you get to do grownup things: in this case, eating mussels and octopus under a beach umbrella and having rounds of pisco sours appearing out of thin air.

I find it disappointing that I'm not as smart as I feel after three of these little time bombs. A list of things we thought were GREAT ideas after baking in the sunshine and enjoying the local moonshine:

1. Buying large fake tattoos of Che Guevara's face. I cannot explain this one.

2. Buying bootleg copies of Precious and that Hugh Grant/Sarah Jessica Parker movie where they have to move to Wyoming in witness protection. Stellar cinematic choices.

3. Swimming.

So there I was, enjoying a nice leisurely dip, swam out into shark territory, and came back to shore only to have my first riptide experience. I literally got repeatedly punched in the face by the Pacific Ocean, tried to escape and got sucked under again. Finally Marlo and Ricardo pulled me out of the stupid waves and I have never more closely resembled a sea monster. I'm still finding sand in my eyelashes (etc).

Later, the doorman at our apartment told us the waves yesterday had also messed up a bunch of the boats in the shipping port, and I felt a little better about my traumatic experience, but OH MY GOSH, everything they warn you about in swimming lessons in elementary school is true! If you run into an undertow in a back alley, give it all your money and don't talk back.

hello, miraflores!

Since we are grownups who do what we want, Marlo and I made the executive decision to spend the next three weeks on the beach. Being a grownup is the coolest thing ever, how come no one told me?! So here we are in Miraflores, Lima in a situation that might commonly be known as living the dream. Here's why:

We are sharing a beautiful townhouse with two Peruvian med students. This townhouse involves a maid and a doorman, but more importantly, it involves TWO MONKEYS IN THE KITCHEN. Saved from a lab experiment only to live a cramped life in a cage, these two little guys spend their time leaping around the cage and releasing pent-up aggression in sexual ways (well, the boy monkey tries; the girl monkey appears to have a headache tonight). Here's a good diet trick: put a sexually charged male monkey (who isn't even wearing a dignified diaper like the street performer monkeys) next to your fridge. Making repeated eye contact with simian penises (peni?) is profoundly disturbing/unappetizing. Don't look at this picture too closely. Fair warning.

The huge, airy cafe with leather couches at the end of our street has a playlist that consists solely of Tupac, Fugees and UB40. That's not a joke, someone at that cafe divined precisely what we want to listen to and plays "Red Red Wine" followed by "Shorty Wanna Be a Thug" and follows it up with remixes of "Family Business." After six weeks of listening to horrid Bolivian pop, Tupac is like water to my thirsty ears. Here's a fancy old lady doing some important work at the cafe. That's right, our creepy documentation of the elderly in public hasn't ceased since we left Buenos Aires.

Our proximity to the beach is absurd (this sunset is a couple blocks from our door), and we have no excuse not to be on the water everyday. When in Rome, people! This has also led to the long-awaited surfing phase of our adventure. Side note: the first and only time I have been surfing was in high school, when a 400 pound security guard named Kaz taught me on Waikiki and my upper body strength was roughly equal to Stephen Hawking's. After a couple days of getting my butt kicked by the Pacific Ocean and wanting to die from paddling so much, I'm currently at the phase where I catch a wave, stand up, get nervous and sit down, realize I'm still on the wave and stand back up, almost hit someone and sit back down, and eventually topple over. Watch out Kelly Slater.

huacachina.

Just a few kilometers (that's right ya'll: we've gone metric) outside of Ica, Peru is a tiny desert oasis, a lake with a fabled mermaid in the middle of rolling sand dunes, as far as the eye can see. This desert is the kind of place you would have to cut a camel open and sleep inside of it if you got lost at night. That's how massively intimidating it is: Star Wars intimidating.
But instead of keeping warm with dromedary guts, we had a hotel with warm blankets. We had this pool at the foot of a dune. We had pina coladas brought out by grinning barmen. We had copies of National Geographic with elaborate maps of ancient Persia.
In short, while other people were sandboarding and flying over the Nazca Lines and dunebuggying, we were perfectly content to relax in this perfect little oasis, surrounded by sand on all sides, and not even moving a muscle.
This may be the best place in the world to spend a January weekend.

city of ash

A blissful day in Arequipa spent antiquing, visiting ancient churches, eating frozen yogurt and loving my camera.