There are days on the road you feel like you accomplish almost nothing and Saturday felt like that. In a straight line we drove an hour from our campground in Paracas to a campground in Ica, and we spent most of the day doing it.
We had had to wait a day in Paracas after the boat ride as the sun remained hidden by heavy overcast and our laundry stubbornly refused to dry. We sat in the cab out of the freezing sea air and watched “Oppenheimer” on our iPad.we had to keep our eyes on Rusty as he had inadvertently decided he liked sitting in some plants that apparently were valued by management so that was a bit of a stress but he cooperated when we said no to him. The forbidden zone which, when he understood was forbidden, Rusty no longer slept in. Good boy.
They charge an absurd one time fee for a dog here, $10 so it felt rather odd they couldn’t put a fence around whatever piece of dust they want to protect. In the end though you just have to expect some cross cultural lack of communication and the campground otherwise was excellent. We foreigners have the privilege of being able to indulge our dogs like children which lower class Latin Americans neither approve of nor can afford to indulge in. They have costly children to raise, a mighty struggle and dogs are farm animals. That’s why we travel: to see, to learn, to report back.
We said goodbye and stopped at the bodega on the nearby block to load twenty liters of water into our tank. In campgrounds we wash dishes in their sinks but we carry thirty gallons of water in our tank. In Latin America we only fill it with potable water (and then filter it through our Berkey) and potable water costs money. In Mexico 20 liters is between fifty cents and a dollar but here it costs nearly five dollars so we hoard it as much as we can. In campgrounds we will fill our Berkey filter with water directly from a faucet but the non potable stuff does tend to clog the filters with impurities and I end up cleaning them quite often. Having clean safe water of our own has been excellent in these countries where even potable water is a public works project too far. Multinational private water companies are making fortunes in the third world.
We said goodbye to Dan and Jane two Australian backpackers with whom we crossed paths. His parents fled El Salvador’s civil war in the 1980s and took him to Australia where he grew up bilingual and could enjoy die along with the locals here. Jane got severely drunk one night in London six years ago and woke up with a one way ticket to Australia. She went on a whim, got a job, got residence and got a boyfriend. A life changing binge. Soon they will be home having children and being normal but for now they wander from Hostal to Hostal creating memories.
We pressed on to Ica a small tourist town with a couple of attractions we wanted to see, including a dune buggy ride on sand dunes and a Pisco tasting vineyard. Roadside art is always present in Peru, we hardly comment anymore on the filth.
We left late had the day got late so we stopped for lunch at what looked like a reasonably clean establishment at the side of the road.
Our server was a bright spark as we answered every question with a shrug and the inevitable question: how do you like it?
In Colombia our entrance would produce smiles and waves and we would say “Buen provecho” to the room which is like saying bon appetit in France. Here the downtrodden Peruvians took a glance and hunched their backs fearful of any connection with the strangers. It wears on you and reminds me of the Soviet Union of my youth a drab place filled with oddly similar people.
The good of course is abundant and interesting starting with a robust chicken noodle soup. The question of which came first is at last scared here as we had chicken and a boiled egg in the bowl.
Layne brought a to go box which fascinated our waitress. That and the fact we travel with a fridge. We had soup for dinner Sunday night, and this was the base.
Main course was carapulcra a Peruvian stew originating among the poor and adopted by the hip and wealthy as a cultural icon. It’s made with pork (or llama or guinea pig) and beans and freeze dried potatoes. Ours was starchy and not especially flavor filled but it was…interesting. The pasta was well cooked and tasted slightly of pesto.
We had the pasta as part of our dinner. Portions are huge in Peru but they do not get lambasted by foreigners like Americans are. Oh well. Prefab housing walls made of reeds for desert dwellers:
Google Maps warned of a 38 minute delay on the PanAmerican but there was no alternative route and sure enough there we were being passed by a Brazilian overlander on two wheels lucky him:
With no deadlines to meet and with slow nudging forward it was much more relaxed for us than it might have been. Layne made me tea and we listened to Detective Bosch work at a murder problem and pondered how slow this would be when we saw bus passengers preferring to get off and walk home:
It took an hour or dinner we finally reached the accident site…
…and one has to wonder how badly they got hurt on this straight stretch of highway. No helicopters to whisk them to a trauma center, the modern response that saved my unworthy life.
On and on the jam went as we saw freedom ahead and everyone started to jostle and honk. I have come to learn that Peruvian drivers aren’t nearly as aggressive behind the wheel as they want to look, compared to Guatemalans and Panamanians they are easy to ignore when they pretend to push.
We made it thanks to Google maps to the peace and quiet of a vineyard said to make excellent Pisco the national bravery of Peru most often drunk in a cocktail of lime juice and egg whites called a Pisco sour.
Unlike US wineries tasting here is a commercial business. They dumped dollops of Pisco into a plastic cup and left us to decide what we wanted with no discussion of how it’s made its history or anything else. If you don’t like the languid snobbery of American wine tastings this was for you.
We tasted, we bought, we left with some decent booze and no warm fuzzies.
I had taken sips from Layne’s tasting thimble which was just as well as Saturday night in Ica was traffic bloody hell. I had a gringo moment with all the pot holes and torn up asphalt, the dust, the aimless pedestrians and random tuk tuks. Oh and the sun was starting to set. Perfect.
Pushy carsxblockedcintersections and horns were cascading across the city like a call to battle. I used GANNET2’s imposing bulk with my peripheral vision(no eye contact) to muscle through to the no fee ATM at Banco de La Nacion.
Rusty and I walked keeping an eye on our home but as cruddy as the town was, everyone acted busy and ignored us completely. We felt like we stood out lost and vulnerable in a run down city center.
We got our $100 each, the limit for daily ATM withdrawals on our Key West debit cards as set by the Peruvian authorities. In Colombia we could get $500 a day but this country is its own misery.
Our iOverlander campground for the night was called Serenity and so it was, a dude ranch on the edge of town with farm animals, a pool, hot showers and a dirt road to drive to the gate which happily was talk bought for us to get in and relax.
Where were we going?
We elected to eat leftovers at home rather than use the restaurant and that is the joy of a comfortable van that feels like home because it busy your home. We blocked our Peru for a few hours and were ourselves in our own space.
A time to recharge our batteries before we take on more coastal driving in the morning to see more of southern Peru on our way to Arequipa.
