Paracas had served its purpose well. Alberto, our host in PBH, had supplied us with as much information as we could handle (and then regurgitated it to every new guest who came through the front door). But we had to leave and travel the dusty stretch of road to Pisco, the town which gave its name to Peru (and Chile's) somewhat infamous aguardiente.
Bye bye paper thin walls and cats on corrugated iron roofs, goodbye toilets and showers with locks on the outside as well as inside. Goodbye posh hotels encircling us, baying quietly for our blood and cash. We're going to Pisco, town which hit the headlines in 2007 when an earthquake devastated the area, an event from which the town has yet to recover (says 2010 Lonely Planet guide to Peru).
Out of the hostel and into the colectivo, PNS$3 each to hurtle up the badly paved road, rough but straight, past the stinking fish factories and the charmless beach, past the drinking dens of old toothless men surrounded by little piles of bleached-out sand, past yet more walls with electoral candidates written in bold colours six feet high and fifty feet long. I need not dwell on the rubbish, the tin cans, the bottles, the stray dogs, children, mineral deposits, dismal seaside sanguich kiosks ('In Peru they are sanguiches, not sandwiches' one board outside a restaurant read in Paracas, in English) and other refuse. It's Pisco that's the attraction here!
Feeling like I've laboured the point a bit? Pisco is about a depressing a place as we have encountered after 17 weeks here. Almost all buildings have been reduced to a single floor after the seismic disaster, so the skylight is grey sky pierced with infinite half-constructed walls and supporting rods stuck out obscenely at where the sun should be. Posada Gino isn't as awful as the PSN$127 we have paid for three nights suggests (GBP27.80, or approx 4.60 a night). We have a private room with hot water, lots of light and air, and no one else in the B&B to annoy us. We even have our own tv with DirecTV (which is the full fancy version of their cable tv down here, all the good channels). Over the course of the weekend we shall enjoy such treats as The Pelican Brief (in Spanish), Platoon (in Spanish), an Australian DIY show called Renovators (in English), plus any number of horrid shows on a tv channel called Glitz than no heterosexual man was ever meant to know existed. Naturally, there are also sports channels. More on that later.
We venture out of the Posada to see if Pisco can give up some of its secrets early on. Sadly there aren't any secrets to give up. A mooch round the Plaza De Armas (attractive), a look at the church and neighbouring-but-abandoned Town Hall (attractive, but wasn't earthquake proof), and a few Soles from the bank machine, and we've exhausted this place. We get as far as the market which, fair do's, is quite interesting actually, and I managed to buy an ugly shirt for a fiver. You are not ready for this shirt. I shall wear it in Lima and scare you all. The market is mostly knock-off clothes and, surprisingly, Pisco seems to have a big skateboarding sub-culture. Lots of shops offering baseball caps and big heavy shoes. One woman is even sells skateboards out of buckets at the side of the road.
Yet you can't miss the class difference between Pisco and, say, Arequipa. The town is poor. The people, although mostly friendly, look downtrodden, and the town is overrun with little Postman-Pat-style taxi-motorbike-cabin things, which blaze up the streets honking at every corner. To be sure, everyone in Peru is obsessed with tooting their horn all the time, but its a real addiction here.
We're done with Pisco on day one. Hour One. We go for a coffee and I read the paper as we try to think of what to do. Here's a situation to ponder over: with Peru so praised for the quality of its coffee, for what reason is it impossible to get a decent cup of the stuff in the provinces? Over three days we ordered several cups of coffee. Not one was proper coffee. Every time we received a mug of tepid water and a little jar of instant coffee with which to flavour our water. Dire, disgusting, and probably poisonous. If it hadn't been for one curious find, I'd swear off cafes in Peru. Yet I uncovered, with my first cup of brown muck, a delicious Lemon Merangue Pie (or Pye de Limon as they are down here). Its been years since I last had a piece. Pity it wasn't warm with a big blob of cream on it, giving me a heart attack and making me happy.
So we fight to the girl for change because no one in Pisco actually has any money at any time unless they've been to the supermarket, and we end up giving her a massive handful of change but 40centimos short, and she's sort of ok with it, but not really. Sarah doesn't give a damn about her because she reckons she's been sitting staring at her for half an hr. Desperation forced Sarah to drink that cup of instant brown. Other waitresses will not get off so lightly before Monday is out.
At the hostel we work out a plan; use the next two days to plan the rest of Peru, then sit back and enjoy it rather than wonder when we next need to dedicate a day or so to finding out bus times from hither to thither. A good plan. After a little work we are hungry, and out we go in search of dinner. The darkened streets of Pisco are not very enticing, and we find ourselves in Nanditos, unprepared but willing. The little waitress girls brings me a page offering chicken in fractional amounts. We ask for half a chicken each. In five minutes we receive our delicious rotisserie chicken, with two portions of chips each and a bucket of salad, all for less than a fiver. It is an ugly volume of food. Inca Cola only goes so far with this dry protein / carb combination. We masticate with one eye on a Gladiators-style show that involves answering questions, the other on a programme honouring kids who saved their families from flood / poverty / teen obesity / fathers with angry hearts / death / other. There was a lot of weeping in it. I thought Sarah was weeping-by-proxy, but was wrong. She was in her element.
If my sleep that night was any indicator, Saturday night in Pisco is a boisterous affair involving going to someone's house (maybe even a discotech!) and playing the music as loud as humanly possible. At 6.30am you should go out into the middle of the street and just scream and scream like you are being attacked by a gigantic hedgehog called Spiney Norman. Luckily, the sun comes up about 6am and makes it difficult to sleep, so you can just go to work after that.
Which might explain our ropey breakfast. Perhaps it was supposed to be a late night snack for someone, and just got missed in the morning light. Maybe, indeed, the baps were fine but the tepid water and instant coffee was just a very bad idea after poultry overload. No matter. We pick out one of the few eateries offering El Desayuno, but our request for 'bread and jam and coffee' was politely ignored for brown water, stale baps filled with cold chips, steak and onion. I didn't figure they were poisonous, but I should have guessed. Sarah, on another of her health kicks, refrained from breakfast once she saw it, so I was condemned to it all.
My famously robust stomach let me down. By the time I was done I was feeling horrid, ten minutes later in the supermarket it was end of days, and we went back to the hostel, where I spent the following hours watching the Sevilla game on tv and vomiting little amounts of water. Around 5pm we venture out again for some water and Gatorade which, thankfully, helps me expel all the rest of the bad food. Feel a bit better instantly, although my day is not helped by my reoccuring shoulder injury making its way across my back and sticking beside my left shoulderblade. This is not the best day of my life
Feverish Sunday night spent drifting in and out of sleep watching bad tv. Wake in a sweat on Monday morning. Pisco has not been destroyed again and we are still here. Our plans to consider going to a winery are definitely not going to be realised. I feel a tiny hunger, and we again find ourselves in a little cafe offering up breakfast. This time its Ensalada De Frutas. Should be a winner. When it arrives it would clearly kill Sarah. The Peruano love of sugar means we have a platter of banana, cantaloup melon, grapes and apple, topped with buttescotch sauce and hundreds and thousands. Not to mention two delicious glacee cherries on the summit. It works for me, it hurts diabetics. Yet more brown water to round out the experience.
Plans are limited now. We take photos of the town, where apropriate, and run out of sites in ten minutes. Sarah feels bad yet again about her choice of destinations. I reassure her that it is better to have been sick here than in a 12 bed dorm room. She almost feels better. In a final attempt at gettng coffee we go to the only half-way respectable venue in the town, but its a dead duck. We play snakes n ladders, and a game of draughts where Sarah beats me, and the waitress is horrified that Sarah has not drunk her bucket of brown water. I get no grief for consuming my entire slice of very avergae Lemon Merangue Pie. I think we admit defeat by Pisco's cuisine.
We return to the hostel, deflated, and pack. Our bags are heaving now, full of little mementos and gifts, and I look forward to that point in the next 7 weeks when I just throw out almost all my clothes. I want to burn most of them. The football shirts and my nice second-hand Guess jeans are coming with me, but my shorts will probably fall apart before then. You learn two things on a trip like this; that you can survive with a very limited wardrobe, and that you probably don't really want to. Fortunately I only really brought clothes I don't like with me, knowing they would not be coming home. Maybe that affects how I feel about them already.
I can just about feel an urge to eat dinner, and just around the corner we find a small Italian restaurant (I use this description very loosely) when I have a piece of lasagne which tastes like it has been made by a four year old with ADHD, the sweetest savoury dish ever made. Sarah's half-a-pizza looks a lot better, but she needs more carbs than I do. Our waitress, not for the first time, has to run out to the corner shop to get us something we want, Coke Zero in this case. Still, nothing wrong with that type of service. We talk wistfully about returning home and making my famous lasagne, and I crave a big blob of crunchy peanut butter on the side. For all the peanut sellers here, peanut butter is simply non-existant.
Back at the hostel we finally request breakfast for the following morning. Our bus is at 10am and Lima awaits us. The rest of the trip is becoming a headache. UK Passport Office website is not registering receipt of our applications, we leave BA in seven weeks and five days, we have ESTAs to apply for for the US, and somehow we need to get from La Paz in Bolivia to Buenos Aires virtually overnight. It doesn't help that I have a big wad of Argentine Pesos to spend too, left over from the southbound leg of the trip. We need to string out Peru as long as possible, and it looks like Bolivia is simply going to be a no-go this time. But then little of this trip has really gone as planned. Our general path has been fairly faithfully followed, but the logistics have been quite different. The distances are colossal, I want to buy a map of South America and mark out our trail and bask in the idiocy of what we did in six months. The initial idea required no deviation, nor anything going wrong, so it was bound to fail.
Seven days in Lima. Our fifth capital city, another sprawling monster, a notorious crime-ridden hell, and infamous for its seeping grey haze that embraces the sky and the ground and the mountains around it. And food. Lots and lots of excellent food.
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