Journal: Day 26

There's a lot to look back on now; I haven't written anything in a long while. Admittedly, I got a bit down a few days back as I began to feel that the pace of our movement across the continent really started to slow, and it seemed as though we were loosing that jet-powered drive we swept through Bolivia and Peru with.

I think that a lot of that down spirit came from the disappointment (or more like discrepancies between expectations and reality) of Ecuador, which we had long viewed as the climax, the summit of our trip. Our volcano ascent, described previously, had been a big goal that we'd seen ourselves as training for ever since climbing that first cerro in Tupiza. Maybe all that expectation glorified the experience in our minds, and I suppose that I was expecting to be hit with some overwhelming sentiment of power and accomplishment as I reached the top, but really I was just painfully out of breath.

Before that, we really really rushed through all of highland Ecuador, in search of our dream land of glorious Ecuadorian beaches (an idea that seemed so tantalizing when set against the high cold mountains we'd wandered for all the days prior). So, we passed everything by, driven by obsession with a goal, and left San Lorenzo for Montanita, our 'promised land.'

What we found there was actually and out-of-season surf town, which we were promised was awesome for the other half of the year when the sun came out and the clouds blew away. It was overcast, slightly chilly, and wore all marks of an abandoned beach party town. That was rather disappointing for our dreamy Ecuadorian beach destination. The worst part is that San Lorenzo was hot and steamy, bearing all sorts of tropical fish and fruits on muddy roads by the side of the swampy sea - meaning we'd left a pretty awesome place behind in an attempt to spend more time in 'awesome' Montanita. So we learn. Never get so fascinated with the idea of reaching a goal that you bypass everything on the way. 


Luckily, though, we made our way farther south after just two nights and two large bags of some Ecuadorian smokeables, arriving then in Machala - the banana capital of the world (a title that had made the place another trip highlight carrying great expectations from the start). We took a long bus ride to the port, where at the edge of the city scores of tankers rallied, all flying the flags of their homelands in Africa, Asia, and all the rest of the world. We caught a small longboat at the pier, and weaving through the mangrove marsh once again, we found our dream beach. It wasn't perfect. In fact, it was pretty nasty at first. There was trash and debris strewn ashore as far as you could see, and the sun still heartily resisted making an appearance. But, we had nothing better to do but sit and wait for the weather to change, and after several hours of hopeful milling around, the air got warm, the sand took on a warm earthy glow and the water a dazzling shimmer.

Almost as a gift to us, as if acknowledging our patience and regard for the movement of the sky, the planet decided to throw one huge gaping hole in the clouds our way, and the sun jumped through to be with us on the beach. Sitting in the warmth by palm trees on the Ecuadorian island beach was satisfying. And so I saw my disappointment in the recent past laid to rest. All it took was a little patience and pleading with the world around us to realize our month-long dream of a nice beach in the sun. Goal: accomplished.

We saw the sun set over the sea, then over the mangroves as we took a boat back to the mainland. As the sun disappeared, and its last touches of the day dissolved into the sea, the bay took on an almost psychedelic aura. The brown murky water of the mangrove marsh put its own tweak on the reflection it threw back of the blue and purple sky where the moon had decided to come out, shining in full force, before the sun had totally gone. Behind that, the rolling Ecuadorian Andes popped in and out of the blue hazy clouds, completing a masterpiece landscape that could have been thought up by a techno spray-painter who does his work on 6th Street.

What I saw before me was as breathtaking as the greatest masterpiece on canvas, and yet its mind boggling to imagine that such a scene could be assembled so arbitrarily by the Earth.

The next morning ended our fairly odd stint in Ecuador, as we took a lengthy assortment of buses south to Peru through Tumbes, a locality named by my Lonely Planet guide as the 'most dangerous dorder crossing in the world.' We found it not to set the standard to high, so come on undeveloped countries, step up your game.

From Tumbes, we some how managed to slither (free of charge) onto a waiting bus, and a tourist bus at that (luxury). Headed down the Peruvian coast, we passed by almost endless kilometers of beaches, glowing bronze between the coastal desert and the hot setting sun. They seemed so peaceful. I was fairly tempted to stop the bus and get off right there. But I didn't, because I have self control and I am good. A fairly comfortable night on a bus ensued.

We found ourselves once more in Lima, but if experience has taught us anything, its keep your time in Lima minimal in interest of seeing other places not perpetually engulfed in a shroud of dank gloomy smog. We caught word of some interesting towns south of Lima on the coast, so within hours of our arrival we were rolling out of town.

Now we're arriving to the present. Due completely to George's knack for making friends with anyone he ever sits by, we found ourselves last night sharing and upstairs bedroom in a relatively upscale house in Pisco, as the family cheered and watched the big boxing match downstairs. This house belonged to the owner of a tour company, and also happened to be the aunt of George's friend from the bus, earning us a VIP stay in an actual house. Sweet.

This morning, we were made breakfast, then went out with the idea of taking a boat to some islands of particular interest, except we never did because, according to the coast guard equivalent, ''the sea was moving."

So, we headed farther south, landing us in another one of those seen-it-in-a-book-but never-expected-to-actually-be-there-places. It was the sand dune desert of southern Peru - an entire landscape forged exclusively by monstrous piles of powder-soft sand nudging and rolling into each other, stretching out to the edge of the visible world. I was on Tatooine.

 

It was almost hard to believe it was real, and harder yet to believe that I was standing right there amongst such a marvelous yield of the land. As the sand blew up in an evening breeze and shuffled about the air around us, the light of the soon-to-set sun diffused in a nearly psychedelic fashion, tossing a magical  glowing shroud over our endless world of sand.

We took a dune buggy into the dune forest - out into the desert. Standing up above it all, I thought how cool it was that natural processes acting on such a massive scale would create a world like this - so different from any other. It seems almost unnatural, like the brain child of some sickly creative, self-loathing genius.

We sand-boarded down the dunes, first the small ones, then some bigger ones, and I took quite a nasty 15-second fall that even evoked a highly concerned in George's voice. Oh no...  Now, sitting a yet another bus headed farther south to Nasca, I am likely more saturated in sand that I have ever been in my entire life.

Journal: Day 13

"Pyramids"

Lima turned out to just be so awfully ugly that we shortened out stay in the city to a reasonably modest hour-long meal in a chinese restaurant in one of the various bus terminals before modifying our itinerary significantly and heading north to a town called Chiclayo, Peru. We got in around 05:00, and, as we've grown accustomed to doing, waited for the sun to rise before venturing out, then took a stinky little jam-packed van about 45 minutes north to see the famous "pyramids." As it turns out, though they may have been pyramids 500 years ago, what remains may not necessarily warrant the title, and we found ourselves looking ponderously and massive heaps of very geometric crumbling mud. Yet, not even they failed to attract a crowd of senior British tourists.

So we took another van to the next significant archeological site down the road, but fairly quickly gave ourselves up as lost, flagged down another van to Lambayaque, where we headed for the museum of the Senor de Sipan. The museum, it turns out, was surprisingly legitimate, but it did some nasty work with the San Pedro I had eaten hours before. Thus, I entered a bleak and empty, yet largely expansive world, and the very dark museum with spot-lighted golden relics spread throughout transformed into a vacuum space through which I was floating from one myseteriously lit golden sculpture to another. Not to mention, a whole posse of tiny golden and ceramic, jewel-adorned figured, built as guardians of the dead, all had a story of their experiences as a tomb guard to mumble to me. Relearning the physical bounds of this new limitless world just became too shocking, so I ended up vomiting outside.

Our pier

Coming back to Chiclayo, we caught a bus to the ocean (a surprisingly hard vehicle to track down...  we literally met several people who could not tell us where the ocean was), and walked out onto an old train pier, marking our first steps together over the Pacific ocean (even though we'd seen if fromt he bus window the entire day before.

Climbing over the railing, I sat on a timber that jut out, an expected result of such imperfect construction, over the ocean as the sun set, and a truly indescribable peace came over me. I can't recall ever having felt that way before, and I don't ever want to forget how it was, because I can't imagine that all people alive get lucky enough to feel as I did some time or another in their lives. Maybe it was the act of getting to the sea, or realizing that we'd crossed an entire continent, coast-to-coast. Maybe it was just sensing the reality of watching the solemn sun set over the Pacific at a Peruvian that was real in a very modest way. Or maybe, it was just taking the time to realize what it is that I've been doing these past days, and how far I'd come to arrive to the rickety pier on which I was perched above the sea.


Either way, the feeling I got hinted that everything in the world was just the way it's supposed to be, and that I'd found the perfect point on the global scale to sit my tiny body down and bring balance to it all. I could have died on that spot and had nothing to be ashamed of or sorry for. That's how I'd like to be remembered, in a living, breathing photograph of me in that spot, feeling the world around me.


If they were to make a movie of my life, the very last scene before it fades to black would be that 18-year-old unshaven dirty kid with a bandana in his long hair, hanging off the edge of a broken pier, set before the fading sun over the sea.

I know, I'll chase the feeling 10 months and and a thousand miles if I have to, but when I get to the edge of the world and that indescribable feeling transcends the body, its more than worth it. I hope I never forget that sensation or those two long hours on the pier for the rest of my life. This is freedom. Bring it on, world.