Gracias Perou y Ecuador

January 27^th, 2022 

Well, all good things come to an end.  It’s been 95 awesome days in Peru and Ecuador.  As is usual with backpacking, I visited many places, did a lot of different activities and met some awesome people.  Before leaving Paracas, I did a mental recall of the trip and I could remember almost every single day, where I stayed and what I did.  That’s what I love about travelling.  When I teach paragliding and do tandem flights in the summer, I do love it, but the days seem hard to discern between one and the next as they are fairly similar.  That’s one of the main reasons that I quit my IT job.  I couldn’t tell one year from another except for what 2 week holiday I took.  That’s not a way to live.

Here are some highlights:

Paragliding in Lima

Paragliding in Paracas

Flying over the Nazca Lines

Gorgeous skies in Arequipa

The floating islands of Lake Titicaca

Machu Picchu of course

Making new friends

Banos, Ecuador

Paragliding in Banos

The Devil's Cauldron Waterfalls

Volcanic caldera in the Galapagos Islands

Scuba diving with hammerhead sharks, rays, turtles and sea lions in the Galapagos

Quito

Swinging above Quito

Straddling the equator

Near Huaraz in Peru

Laguna 69

Monkeys!

And big snakes...

But I’m ready to return to Canada, my home.  Having a regular bed and not being constantly on the road is also nice.  I do enjoy the current lifestyle I have.  Six months of intensive teaching and tandems at the Freedom Flight School, two and a half months of a part time job of doing tandems at Revelstoke’s ski hill and three months to explore another part of the world.  I feel very fortunate.

 

Where to next?!?

Kite Surfing Lessons in Paracas

January 19^th-21^st, 2022 

For my last side trip before heading back to Canada, I decided to return to Paracas to continue my kite surfing lessons.  I booked the front seat on the top floor of the double decker bus and it was a lovely 3 ½ hour journey south of the capital during a sunny afternoon.  The weather was much better than when I travelled this route in early November and I got to appreciate the terrain more.  Going back to somewhere you have already visited certainly reduces the stress factor of backpacking.  I knew where the hostel was, where my favourite restaurant was etc.  You don’t feel like a rookie.

I would assume some kind of Jesus statue south of Lima.

Somebody's little beach home.  That's the ocean in the background...hard to tell with the tinted glass from the bus. 

Rollin' down the highway.

Nice coastline.

Back in Paracas:

The Malecon:

It was the chef at the restaurant next door's birthday...someone hired a mariachi band to celebrate.

The day after arriving I was picked up by Jorge, one of the instructors with Jose Luiz’s kite surfing outfit.  I had met him briefly back in November but only did about an hour of lessons with him.  For the next three days, he would be my main guy for the daily two-hour sessions.

 

On the first day, it took me a probably about 45 minutes to shake the rust off and get consistent with my water starts.  Then it started to flow and I had some good rides.

The action on the beach after my first day's lesson:

Near the end of the second lesson, we started to work on transitions; turning around and coming back the other way without sitting back down in the water.  The trick was to try and flip the board around so you were on your toe edge for a brief moment before swinging the kite back in the other direction and then following it.  Well, needless to say, the first number of times I tried I would either focus on the board and forget about the kite or the other way around.  Finally, it started to click and I had some decent transitions.

An okay water start:

On the last day, I was going to jokingly ask Jorge if I could learn how to do jumps.  Seemed a bit early for that, but before I even brought up the suggestion, he stated that we would try it.  Well, that was a bit of the cart before the horse.  I didn’t seem as in tune with the board and the kite as I was the day before.  I eventually got some good transitions in, and I did have about a 4-5 minute stint of continuous riding but in general I did perform as well as I had hoped to.  I also had a few good runs upwind, which is a key skill to develop as otherwise you’ll be walking up the beach at some point.

Stoked for today's lesson:

On one of my runs, I felt like Mother Nature was challenging me.  I was riding away from the beach and all of a sudden a curious sea lion popped up about 20 feet way.   That was cool but he threw off my concentration and soon after I wiped out…then I felt my right leg wrapped around what felt like a wet blanket.  I knew right away what it was and quickly tried to move my leg away…it was a huge jellyfish.  That’s going to hurt.  I wanted to relaunch the kite but then I saw another big jellyfish and I was heading straight for it so I overpowered the kite in slight panic and did a bit of a “Jesus walk”.  Thankfully it wasn’t too hard to retrieve my board and it did improve my confidence with that skill as the day before I couldn’t get back to my board and I had to bodysurf into the beach.  Jorge went and retrieved it.

Didn't quite pull off this transition...and none of my good ones were filmed.  :(

I kind of wished I had one more day to do another lesson, although my body was actually pretty happy to be done.  My stomach, back and shoulder muscles were ready for a break.  I feel like I’m at the point that I could practice with minimal supervision and hone my skills.  I was definitely happy to have come back for a few more lessons.

Me and Jorge:

In the back on the left is Jose Luiz and another instructor Andres:

Thanks Jorge and Jose Luiz!

Football & Fishin’ in the Jungle

January 15^th, 2022 

Well by day 3, I think I’d pretty much done everything in the jungle around the Maniti Lodge, especially considering how crazy and amazing day 1 was.  Linder was wondering what to do with me and I actually told him that I was cool to chill for the first part of the morning as I had actually gotten sick at 3 am the night before…something in the jungle didn’t like me.

 

The day before, a new group of people had shown up.  There was a brother and sister from Nashville, Kirsten and Todd, and a dad, Joe, with his 13 and 11 year-old daughters, Camilla and Rosario, from Chile.  It was nice to have some new blood in camp.  All super nice people.  It was a lesson in not stereotyping too.   Kirsten and Todd were only in Peru for 8 days, just here to visit the jungle.  With their twangy southern accents, I thought they were “ignorant” American tourists as their attempt at Spanish was pretty bad, but it turned out that Kirsten has travelled extensively, from east Asia and eastern Europe to Greenland…although she slightly blew it by asking/assuming that I’d been to Greenland since I live so close to it being in Canada.  I politely (being Canadian) stated that no, I hadn’t been there.  In retrospect I thought that she might be closer to Greenland in Tennessee than I am in Canada!  The brief time I got to spend with them was fun.

 

That afternoon, the “newbies” headed off with Segundo to Monkey Island.  Linder and I walked over to a nearby village where a big football (soccer) tournament was happening.  He first gave me a tour around the place, including checking out some old school wooden equipment for squeezing sugar cane and de-husking rice.  But then it was time to check out the main event, the tournament.

A bridge to head out to the river:

Some nice giant lilypads:

The "port" for the village

The sugar cane press:

Linder explaining the rice de-husker.

A bunch of sweet, slightly alcoholic, but meant to be for health drinks.

It is a lush environment.

Teams from villages one or two hours up and down the river came for the event.  Matches were only about 20 minutes long as there was a lot to get through.  Linder and I holed up at a small shack where we could get a beer and enjoy the action through an open window.  At first, I was the only gringo in sight but later we did see a few other tourists, although they didn’t stick around for the duration.  It was exciting and fun.  The local team made it to the semi-finals where they almost scored to go ahead but were scored on shortly after and lost.  A few other matches were decided by penalty shootouts.  

The football pitch:

The action from our vantage point.

Note the two roosters and a dog sitting down, right on the football pitch.  Luckily their were no incidents...

A penalty shootout in one of the earlier games:

For some reason, I guess being the only gringo, I attracted a few of the local drunks.  At first there was a man in his 60s who reminded me of Chilean Juan who I knew over a few years in India.  But he was easily usurped by an older gentlemen in his 70s who had earlier been singing with a few other sauced fellows inside the building.  This guy barely made it to the bench I was sitting on and was definitely “furniture dependant” as we called it back in university (needing to hold on to something as to not fall over).  Sadly, the crowd thinned out towards the finals as each team from another village that had lost earlier decided to get on a boat and head home.  Nonetheless, it was a fun afternoon and a good cultural experience.

The guy in the blue shirt on the left was the really inebriated one.  Surprising the guy with the guitar was have decent at playing and singing.

Here's Linder trying to lead the singing:

Action both inside and out!

This boy was loving his juice in a plastic bag...sucked it back in no time.

Sunset on our way back to the lodge.

The next morning, around 11 am, Linder and I jumped in a canoe to try a bit of fishing.  We first paddled out to the Amazon but soon returned to the small creek.  It was definitely different to my first fishing experience on day 1, where we just dropped a line in with bait and we had bites within 10 seconds.  This time, I only got about 4-5 bites over half an hour and yet again, didn’t catch a fish.  Linder did pull in a catfish, which was the first one I had seen caught here, but it was all of 6-7 inches long.  He asked me whether we should keep it for lunch, but it hardly seemed worth it, so I suggested that he toss it back in to grow up and get bigger.

Fishin'.

Patience, patience, patience...

The monstrous catfish.

After lunch, it was time for me to head back to Iquitos.  Instead of a big taxi boat, the lodge sent one of its boats to take me, Segundo, the mother and daughter from Lima, their guide Cesar and a few others back to the “big” city.  We stopped about 2/3’s of the way back to check out this fish sanctuary.  Well it wasn’t just fish, there were some caiman alligators, various birds and some turtles. 

Heading back to civilization.

Cruising up the Amazon.

Passing a bigger village:

The sanctuary:

Feeding the fish.

Baby Caimans...so cute.  They are only about a foot and a half long.

The big boys.

I loved how the turtles didn't seem to care at all about the caimans.

Caiman selfie!

But the headliner were the Arapaima giant fish.   My gosh, these things were gigantic!  They can be up to 3 meters long and weigh up to 200 kg.  They looked like huge koi fish, but I mean huge.  Unfortunately, they have been fished close to extinction, or at least they are endangered.  I guess they taste too good.  Many Brazilians (and I’m sure Peruvians) have fished them extensively.  I hope they make a comeback as they were impressive.  Check out this recent article on them.

I put my foot there, not hoping that they'd bite it as they are carnivores, but to give some sense of scale.

Polly want a finger?!?

The "watchbird" for all the booze.

Back on the river...a big abandoned ship.

Hard to see, but it's a military hovercraft...cool.

Getting close to Iquitos...there's the big bridge again.

The dock.

Mmmm...shish kebab grubs anyone?

Back to the chaos of the city.

A family of four on a bike.

Nice sunset clouds that night.

This is the Casa de Fierro (Iron House) which guides will state that it was designed by Gustave Eiffel...but it likely it wasn't.  But it might be the first pre-fabricated building in the Americas.

What a great, quick trip to the Amazon jungle.  I have to admit, I was ready to move on, but I’m glad I came.  It’s just too damn humid, and I couldn’t imagine when it gets super hot.  I can only put up with sticky balls for so long…