an iceburg´s tipple

ha. phew. okay. I'm still in Lima. I only really intended to stay here
a couple of days, but my oracles seemed to think otherwise. I spent a
great deal of time wandering around Paracas. It's super peaceful,
especially during the week when the line of luxury pool flanked pads
are empty, and a great deal of interesting dead things get washed up along the shore, so I was snapping happily.

During the last of my
jolly wanderings, about an hour before I was to bust off to Ica, a
young cool-accountant looking guy yelled something about meeting his
boat from his pool flanked pad. I was with a young French Canadian
girl i'd met half an hour before, and having just been to the
Ballista’s islands that morning, knew what a wonder cure being whipped
about in the sea breeze was for my hangover, "sweet, sure, we'll meet your boat". Turns out he'd said "boss", though not to worry, it was just a ploy to get us to come over to the deck and have a wine, another fairly solid wonder cure. Juan Pablo and Gonzalo, nice dudes,
both from Chincha. They invited us to Juan Pablo's brother's beach
house near Chincha to catch the last night of the Verano Negro
festival. Okay. And this time there was actually something where it
suggested it might be. Really driving African rhythms with carton,
quickly becoming my favourite percussive piece. It's a large, as you
may have guessed, wooden carton, which is placed between the legs and
played all over with sticks. It has a huge hollow resonance which can
be manipulated by lifting one's heels into a tiptoe position, thus
opening up the 'sound hole' at the bottom, for want of better musical
terminology. The centre piece of these parties is a tree filled with
balloons, which everyone dances around, hacking into the trunk with a
machete whenever the mood takes them. When it finally falls, the crowd
leaps on it to claim their own goody filled balloon, or more if
they're crafty. I went to another such party last weekend, in another
blocked off dead end street with a tree in the middle. Just how they
manage to grow trees quickly enough for the succession of parties is a
mystery I never want to solve.

Back to the beach house... it turns out Juan Pablo's brother was on
exchange for a year in Te Kuiti, good luck for me in a loan of a beach
house sort of a way. sweet.
The beach houses there have all been built in the last 5 year, under
the antithesis of central otago's district plan. Nestled below the
grand dunes lie the most gaudy red, yellow and blue boxes. But it's a
private beach, so no one else has to look at them right? And neither do
you, but the sunset's rather pretty.

Went back to Lima for a party which I subsequently defaulted on with
Juan Pablo that weekend, and met a bunch of people, including Marco,
who has a lovely big apartment in San Isidro, which he welcomed me to
stay at, an offer gratefully accepted. He works in the fishing industry, doing something with anchovies which I´m too afraid to ask about should it be bottom trawling. Isn´t that terrible of me? He took me down to the port to check out one of his boats, currently under construction.

It´s pretty interesting to see how the apartment holding around here make their money. Marco´s father has a huge battery hen farm at his house in Chincha, but what can I do, let them free? Documenting the poor creatures and being vocally vegan is all i´ve come up with. There were some battery pigs too. They keep them from moving so that the crackling is just right. mmm.

I got around to interviewing Vasco from the Institute of Legal Defense for an article in last
week's critic. I'm still here, but he's moved apartments since, so I got to help choose the kitchen.

We also seem to go to a new destination every weekend, a practice i
hope keeps getting practiced, as i hear we're off to the jungle for
Easter. A fortnight ago we were in Ica, home of HUGE sand dunes, which
we dunebuggied our way down at rollercoaster like speeds, a little
more terrifying without the rollers...

I also attempted to sand board with Marco and two lovely lady friends Claudia and Rosela
but I don't think the board had enough wax to work properly.

In a similar vein last weekend was spent not really surfing at all.

I've started a Spanish school and am quite content for the moment. I
have a dozen more galleries to see, and the counterfeit DVD people
have all sorts of interesting and yet to be released titles to keep my
cinema and subtitulo requirements well satiated.
Once I'm done here, I'm heading north along the coast to Ecuador, but
in the meantime it's all Peruvian zines and photos of graffiti for me. And a few odd pics for you.


If you ever wondered how they put ships in bottles... this fruit was placed in the wine bottles when it was much younger, and, according to my drunk host, grows in the alcohol. I bet it´s the bottom of bucket punch to the power of keg stand. oooweeee!

This is from the old zoo in Barranco, Lima´s grungy interesting arts bit. The zoo doesn´t exist anymore, but this happy creature still entertains the kids. Maybe I should put a series of swings where the hen farm used to be? And, to finish, probably my proudest photo to date. The police throughout Central and South Amercia are SO interesting, and REALLY well dressed, but it´s WAY to risky to photograph them doing anything. But luckily, a student protest (against belief based discrimination at a local university) walked right by my window. I joined in and got this one, and got out of the way before too much rock throwing got underway.

oh yeah, and Roberto (nephew of mongo) was released straight away

Tonight I spend in Pisco, a, I don´t know, town? about 3 hours south of Lima. This place takes its name from a brandy like distilled grape drink (or perhaps it´s the other way round, much like my appostrophies which this samsung magic station just doesn´t want to treat me to). The plan was to come here in a couple more days, as there´s supposidley a festival of pisco and other grapish delights of an alcoholic nature next week, but from my luck, or perhaps other´s lack (of organisation in the festival department) who can say, really. The last three days were spent chasing the verano negro festival, I find it very difficult to type that, which is a yearly festival said to eclipse Chincha and neighbouring El Carmen in the rhythm and wonder of the Afro Peruvian population . Despite a town plastered in posters, and an information, or perhaps more appropriately, T Shirt stand, every event I tried to attend had been dissapeared. No music, no dancing, no banners, and strangely, no others looking expectantly. So bizzare! 3 days and 5 events.... gone! It became a festival of taxis that knew just where it was and hotels with prices doubled in festival season. ¡Que raro! Perhaps I´ll go back for the 'grand parade' that everybody is 'practising for' on Sunday.
I popped over to Paracas for the afternoon, and saw my first flock of pelicans. There's a grand national park on the coast with flamingos and no doubt all sorts of other surprises all ready for tomorrow.
Peru itself I'm not really sure about. First destination in SOUTH america, and the big noticable difference for me was a distinct lack of toothy whistling sounds accompanied by ¨hey baby¨ and ¨guapa¨ that I'm still having a great deal of trouble keeping my middle finger in my pocket about. The reason, I've discovered, isn't a great deal more respect for the only blonde on the block, rather, camera phones. It's stressful enough thinking about the cleanliness of the rather viscous pool water I was working my way through this morning, without groups of hombres making phonecalls a meter away from their ears in my direction. My Spanish was a little overloaded in said situation, so I took to swearing at them in English. The most frustrating part is that as a tourist I'm generally über careful that I recieve the permission of anyone I would like to take a photo of. In the Chiapas region of Mexico for example, many people believe that the photograph takes a part of your soul, and is totally taboo. But me in the pool, the street, a bar, the art museum, no no, there's another low quality blur for the collection. Ugh!
I stayed with a fellow couchsurfer in Lima, which was just brilliant. Lima sprawls further than even someone from Christchurch can imagine, and is South America's number one crime destination as voted by travellers I've met so far. Thanks to Vasco, I stayed in an extremely safe, well patrolled and McDonalded part of town close to expansive book shops and a supermarket with all the tropical fruits and grains of my wildest dreams. Yummo!
Vasco's an interesting chap. He just finished law school, and is working for an NGO which, at the moment, involves digging up dirt on corrupt judges trying to make their way into the supreme court. Of the 12 vying for a place, he has leads of the 2 million dollar bribe variety on 10 of them. There's most certainly an interview in that one should I head back to Lima.
Heading into Lima, on another note, is quite a sight. It's incredibly dry in parts, and likewise, incredibly poor. These two elements have bred an incredible maze of mud brick slims? suburbs? which, from the air, appear as a giant sepia coloured tetris. You can tell they're occupied if they have a roof.
What a hard time my brain is having putting all this together.