Bob and Karen's Circle Pacific Tour: Recovery in Huanchaco

Peru was the right place to begin a year's travel

Peru was an eye-opener of a place to launch our trip. It’s a little difficult to remember all the things that went through our minds as we settled into our year off during that first month of leisure. But I recall being sharply aware of the need to travel differently than any previous travel we’d done. This was a year off, and there was no way any person could spend that many days in full-on explorer mode. You have to stop and let the time pass you by. And you have to do that surprisingly frequently. You can bully your way through the strenuous two days of climbing Mount Putukusi and neighbouring Machu Picchu after a big bad bout of altitude sickness, but there are serious physical limits in the longer term. I speak now from a position of clearer understanding. Our first major steps on returning home were health care – Karen to a naturopath to fix her digestive tract, me to the family doctor to treat a knee injury. Now the knee MRI data is in and it turns out that a year of stress to one’s knees doesn’t necessarily cause ligament damage. At least not in my case. Instead, a year of daily strain (and about a dozen mountain climbs) results in bone injuries – extensive bruising and a small fracture to my left femur. My knee may take as long to heal as it took to cause the damage. And Peru was a powerful dose of knee wear with which to begin our year’s adventure. About two-thirds of the way through our year off we began to look back at Peru and comment that it was a good thing we’d done Peru first, because at that point we didn’t feel capable of the mountain exploits we’d done back in September. Now, a full year later, I have similar thoughts regarding the year off. I don’t think I could do it again. I certainly can’t do it again in the condition I’m in now. The effects of aging isn’t the point of this piece but I had to get past that to get to the wind-down in Huanchaco. While Machu Picchu was one of the icons that we built our year off around – the others were Easter Island (up next) and Angkor Wat (towards the end) – the lazing away of days and weeks in Huanchaco is the travel style that we wanted to perfect. Later, we executed a nearly perfect down-time dropout on the island of Koh Phangan, where we spent 33 days doing as close to nothing as two people can manage. In Peru, we spent almost half our month in Huanchaco. It is a small fishing village, with little going for it but charm, and we made it our home. By the time we had wandered every street I knew we were successfully living in the moment. That’s a sensation that we are striving for in our travels and, as much as Machu Picchu was a miracle in the mountains, Huanchaco was its own miracle on the seashore. I am more likely to go back there, but that may just be the bad knee talking. We could always bus it up Machu Picchu.

Re-living our tour in photos

A totally unexpected result of travelling for a year (unlike any other number of months) is that we are re-living the experience month by month as we sort photos. It's September now so we have spent weeks sorting and editing our Peru pictures. As we build a slideshow of our month in Peru, we are choosing from photos that weren't available for posting during our trip. We carried two cameras but only blogged from a backup point-and-shoot. So, here's the result, a handful of our Peru favourites. We might find a few more before the end of September when we switch to reminiscing about Chile. But first we'll have an essay on Peru, which will be our next text post.

Saturday, September 26, 2009

Recovery in Huanchaco

We´ve spent almost a week here in Huanchaco, a very quiet fishing village just outside of Trujillo, in northern Peru. I think we´ve finally caught up on our sleep, although neither of us seem to mind the idea of another week of ¨being on vacation from our vacation¨. The highlights of Huanchaco include: strolling the deserted streets, watching the surfers from our hotel balcony, drinking oversized beers (about $2 for a 650 mL bottle), and eating lots of delicious local seafood. Karen had a stunning shrimp soup with rich golden chowder that hid a large white lump that we didn´t recognize at first. It could have been a potato, but no. We tried small bites and it didn´t taste of much but the texture was soft, not quite slimey. Maybe it was that soft bit inside a lobster claw. Then I cut it in half and a rich yellow yolk spilled into the soup. Hah. A soft-boiled egg. Delicious. At the same table, Bob had a superb cebiche of firm fresh white fish, ¨cooked¨ in lime with some heat from a tiny hot chile. Both our tummies came through the experience unscathed, which was cause for a couple of happy dances coming out of the washroom. Bob has tried several examples of chicha, a purple corn beer with cloves that´s sweet and refreshing like a sangria, and better than ¨purple corn beer¨ sounds. Every recipe is different, definitely home-made.
We´re in the nicest hotel in town. Most surfers are paying $3 a night for simpler lodgings with no view of the ocean. We couldn´t resist the cheap luxury.
We managed to go to an archeological site yesterday, the Huaca del Sol y de la Luna. A well-preserved example of Moche architecture (100 BC to 750 AD), complete with original red and blue bas relief work, which still has much restoration work remaining. We have yet to visit Chan Chan, the major Chimu site (1100 AD) in this area, but we might manage that next week between more rest days.

3 comments:

frankenpoet said...: First post! Glad to hear you're spending some time NOT MOVING. Also: your blog has the delightful flavour of a Jack Vance story, with the food description: all it lacks are clothing notes and colourful local religious crazyness.; September 26, 2009 at 3:30 PM
Anonymous said...: Finally got my act together to check out your blog--really enjoying it so far. I hope you occasionally think of us here beating CCI into submission (or it doing that to us, I'm not sure which!)
Health and happiness from
Catherine in the newsroom; September 27, 2009 at 5:46 PM
Deni said...: Really enjoying reading the blog, and then talking it over with Dad (he sees it at Michael's store) and with Michael.
I saw the Dalai Lama yesterday at a talk and thought you would have found it interesting. Miss having you to talk to on Sunday mornings - so I am doing Yoga then until your return.
Hoist a purple corn beer for me next time!

Deni; September 27, 2009 at 8:41 PM