Mancora 21st to 29th of November
We arrived in Mancora at around 5:30am after an awful
overnight bus ride which included loud music until 1am, extreme air
conditioning and 2 hours waiting in line at the Ecuador/Peru border in the wee
hours. We had the intention to stay for 2 or maybe 3 nights, no more. Little
did we know, at such an early hour after such a hard night, we had landed in
paradise. A moto taxi dropped us at the Guacamayo Bed & Breakfast, a
beautiful, out of the way accommodation which provided the perfect place to
relax. Coconut palms, hammocks, balmy weather, a swimming pool and super
friendly hosts. Rooms made from bamboo and mosquito nets that made me feel like
we were sleeping in one of my childhood cubby houses. We got stuck.
To be quite honest there was very little to do in Mancora, but that was the
beauty of it… it is the perfect place to do
very little. Walks, cocktails, fresh fruit juice on the beach, beers in the
pool, reading books in the hammocks… if we had of consulted a doctor after the
Galapagos, it would have been just what he ordered! We got into a lovely little
routine of getting up for breakfast, back to bed for a read or a movie, out for
a walk to the beach, through the town to look at the artisanal market (where I
may have doubled my jewellery collection), a platano con leche juice on the
beach, to the fruit and veggie market to buy some mangos and fresh veggies to
make dinner, back to the hostel for a relax in the hammock after a swim, back
to town for a cocktail on the beach or a banana bread at a sweet little café…
no wonder we couldn’t leave!
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| If I wasn't being so silly this would be a really cool photo! |
One item that James left out from his blog on the Galapagos
was the beautiful people on our boat, the laughs, the Lexicon, the Uno… Our
boat housed a unique breed of tourist with beauty in their hearts and nature in
their minds, and not too much money in their pockets… you get to know people
pretty well when you spend 8 days and a few bouts of sea sickness together on a
pretty tiny boat… which is why when we heard the wonderful, not so chavy,
Dellen and Sarah were coming down to Mancora in a few days we didn’t need much
encouragement to extend our stay.
The only change this made to our routine was that it now
included a couple of late nights out, one with just the girls, spending the night
dancing with 15 year olds and scamming free drinks, and a second to the full
moon party at ‘The Point’ – one of a chain of party hostels. It really felt
like a ‘holiday’ in the traditional sense of the word.
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| The four of us in the moto taxi, yes, I am on the luggage rack! |
We also took a little moto taxi out to the local hot
springs, a small mud pool in the middle of nowhere, around half an hour out of
town, which we had to ourselves while the sun went down and the stars came out
to play. Though after that trip I have no doubt that a motorbike was not
designed to take 5 adults!!!
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| Coating ourselves in the medicinal mud at the hot springs! |
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| Mancora Beach |
Full moon party, the few photos I could salvage!!!
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| Sarah and I out the front of the hostel. |
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| The full moon party did have free face paint! |
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| Dellen and James, pride of the Union Jack! |
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| Looking a little worse for wear, but having a ball! |
And a little look at our hostel!
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| One of my favourite places in the hostel! |
Eventually we did have to leave, though we could have easily
stayed another week or two, so we booked a bus, said our goodbyes and hopped on
a 20 hour bus ride with quite sore heads from the night before.
Mancora to Santiago 29th December – 3rd January
There really isn’t a lot to say about our journey from
Mancora to Santiago… a total of 70 hours driving in busses through costal
desert. The most notable event was our lunch in the 6 hours we spent waiting in
Lima for our next bus. We were dressed Sunday best, hippy pants, baggy t-shirt,
fat headband, thongs (or flip-flops for the Brits!), but we were up for some
decent grub. In all honesty I don’t want to say how much we spent on that
lunch, I am a little ashamed, but it was worth it for the best spring rolls we
have had our entire trip and some delicious dishes in a very fancy Chinese
restaurant filled with white Limeños whose pockets were bulging with cash. We
felt a little out of place but or bellies were happy.
Just for records sake I’ll recount our trip very quickly, we
could have stopped and stayed a night here or there, but I think we both just
wanted this journey over and done with as quickly as possible, and really I
don’t think we could have done it much quicker!
Bus from Mancora to Lima – 20 hours
6 hour break in Lima
Bus from Lima to Tacna – 20 hours
Overnight in a dingy hotel in Tacna
Collectivo Taxi for border crossing – Tacna (Peru) – Arica
(Chile) 1 hour
Bus from Arica to Santiago – 30 hours
Santiago 3rd – 5th December
Arriving in Santiago we were pretty exhausted, ready for a
decent meal and a comfortable bed. We took a taxi to a neighbourhood where we
could find a couple of hostels, tried to grapple with the crazy currency to pay the taxi driver, and then walked and searched for a hostel. (Un)Fortunately before we came
across suitable accommodations we came across suitable dinner, a steak house
called Las Vacas Gordas (The Fat Cows). We ate, we drank, we were merry. We saw
on the menu a 900 gram steak and thought, well, why not, it’s a lot of meat but
it’ll be worth it… (un)fortunately they didn’t have this cut in stock, only a
1.4 kilogram alternative, it was fate. It was amazing, but, to share a piece of
meat that big gives some reality to the theory of being so hungry you could eat
an entire cow. And when we were stuffed full of meat and beer we noticed that
in fact, we did not have a bed to retire too. Luckily there was a nice, but
expensive, hostel up the road. We fell into bed and set the alarm for 20
minutes before the free breakfast finished, though when we tried to eat
breakfast we found our bellies were still full of steak.
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| Hungry??? |
The following day we headed out to walk the streets of
Santiago, a little preview, to find our way around and see some of the sights.
We wandered the streets and came upon Santa Lucia Hill, a beautiful little park which we
later found out is actually reclaimed land, it was an ugly rock outcrop in the
centre of the city, used for a rubbish dump, before being transformed by
prisoners doing hard labour into the beautiful gardens that it is today. We
heard the cannons fire at midday and took in the beauty of what was once the
garden for the rich folks who lived in the neighbourhood, but is now open and
accessed by all.
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| A fountain on Santa Lucia Hill |
We then bought some cheese and crackers, salami and wine and
made our way (by mini bus) to the top of the San Christobal Hill. We had our
little picnic while looking over the city, a great way to top off a lovely day,
just a taste of what I now think could be my favourite city in South America.
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| The view from San Christobal Hill |
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| And a crazy big spider we saw when we were walking down the hill! |
