Peru to Pichilemu

I'm in Santiago, Chile at the moment and I've got a place in the coastal town of Pichilemu for $150 a month. My ticket from Tijuana to Lima was around 500 bucks and I found a hostel for two for 18 bucks a night. I think there were places across the highway from Miraflores (coastal part of Lima, Peru where I was staying) for $5 a night. It's a ten dollar cab ride from the Lima airport to the hostels in Miraflores or Barranco (where I think the rooms are cheaper). Food in this area is good and cheap if you eat where the locals eat. We were getting three course meals (really good fish soup, dank avocado salad, and various meat/fish plates) for $3 at a place across the street, and there was an alley with four or five restaurants, all of which had great local plates and free berry juice (chicha or something). Eating at the more touristy places is more expensive, like $5-$8, and not as tasty (think crappy deli sandwiches and confusingly bad pasta). I really can't remember a time when I decided to pay more for better food and actually got better food. It's natural to miss fettuccine alfredo, but beware...

Didn't take too many photos of Lima because besides the excitement of being in a new place it was a pretty dirty city, like most I've been too, where the most exciting thing to do was try not to get ripped off by business owners and reefer dealers. At least there is some reefer in Peru; in Chile it's on the list of hard drugs and is therefore virtually non existent. I will double my search efforts when I return to Pichilemu a lonely man (my travelling cohort leaves me tonight for Mexico city where she will be attending Le Cordon Bleu for career building activities). For me the draw of Peru is the barren wastelands of the rest of the coast, which seems to be one continuous rainless desert through which the Panamerican Highway runs north to Ecuador and south to Tacna, the last stop before Arica, Chile. Once the southern hemisphere winter gets going, I think that the surf will be absolutely insane from Southern Chile to Northern Peru, so it is my plan to buy a used tent from a guy I know here in Santiago and just trek up the coast eating beans and rice and churros, showering twice a month and reading the library that makes up half of the weight of my backpack.

If I'm not making a great case for seeing the beautiful nations of Peru and Chile, let me remind those potential visitors that the bus ride from Lima to Santiago, a scant 50 hours or so, takes one on a scenic tour of the driest and most lifeless place on Earth. If you're curious about the validity of this claim, just look it up. They're testing Mars landers out there. It's funny to say to yourself, "You know, this might be what it's like on Mars," and then to look up the Atacama on Wikipedia and find out that science says you're basically correct. It's also funny when you book your 11pm bus ticket and they tell you you'll be arriving at 6am. But you thought that it took like 20+ hours... aw, shit.

In Santiago (I mean Chile, as far as I've found), people sustain themselves on Empanadas and Italianos (foot and a half long hot dogs with guacamole, salsa, and mayo). Unless you're training for a marathon or surfing 5 hours a day, it's a good idea to figure out an alternative. Knowing that the surf would be really good in Pichilemu, we traveled there (four hours on a bus leaking fuel) and ended up haggling for a good room rate. The key phrase down here is "Puede bajar me?," meaning "can't you go a little lower?." I learned this phrase from my first cabbie in Lima, and using it alone I have gotten the best bargains of my life (from $400 a month to $150 and so on). Lying about previous offers is also essential to proper cabana rental fee extortion. I've found that the key to sustainable living abroad is a working stove and oven, good local produce from the stand, and access to a big grocery store where the locals shop. Having a companion who likes to cook and is good at it is nice as well, but as long as you can boil water and bake stuff you're set.

Fruit and Pancakes, Volcanoes,

The good food is the fresh food. The fruit is fresh in fruity places. Volcanoes are a regular part of the landscape from Guatemala on down.