pacific coast

sunset & pelicans in Paracas, Peru

Sunday afternoon we caught a bus to Camana, Peru. We picked our destination kind of at random; I was distracted with work and just wanted to get to the beach, anywhere on the beach! So we heard that Camana was by the beach, we bought a bus ticket, and three hours later we were in Camana. The drive was just a winding two-lane road through a weird alien landscape of sandy, gravelly mountains and dunes. Really quintessential desert. As we went further, the dunes got less rocky and more sandy. And then, over a giant dune, appeared the ocean! There was nothing in-between, just desert merging seamlessly into sand dunes and beach and then ocean, I’ve never seen a place like this before. Camaná turned out to be a small city or a big town, a little bit away from the beach, but it still had a kinda beach-town vibe, lots of ice cream parlors and game arcades and seafood places. In the daytime the town felt really quiet but in the evening, the main plaza filled up completely with families and kids, running and shouting and enjoying the fresh evening air. Two french clowns set up a show in the main square and did a great show for kids; we got ourselves ice-cream cones and enjoyed the show too. They were really talented!

seafood shack on the beach. Camana, Peru

The next day we spent at the beach, doing beachy things like eating ceviche and fried shrimp, wading in the chilly water (I always think of the Pacific ocean as warm, but it wasn’t!) and reading paperback novels while drinking beer under beach umbrellas. That night, after enjoying another performance by the french clowns, we caught an overnight bus to Paracas, six hours up the coast. We were told that only the budget buses stop in Camaná, so we’d have to take a gritty budget service. Our bus turned out to be over an hour late, and then when it arrived, the guy at the bus station would not let us get on our bus! He kept saying “oh, no, there’s another bus coming really soon. You can take the next bus. It’s much better, it’s a very fancy bus, you’ll like that one much better.” We watched twenty other people get on that bus but he wouldn’t let us on! I did not believe him and I tried to argue to no avail and then just sat there, despondent, imagining us stuck in the bus station with all our bags, all night long. But lo, twenty minutes later, another bus appeared! And it was a luxury bus! It stopped just for the two of us, and we climbed aboard, very surprised but thankful… it was air-conditioned, it had huge bathrooms and plush leather seats that convert into actual beds, they gave us blankets and pillows, the whole thing was really surreal. We have no idea why this happened to us! But we slept well and in the morning they woke us up to get off the bus in Pisco.
Pisco is a port city a few hours south of Lima that was pretty thoroughly destroyed in an earthquake in 2007. We thought we’d just check into a hostel there, sleep for a while longer, then head over to explore Paracas, which is a beautiful beach town nearby, and a starting-point for boat trips to the Islas Ballestas. But I ended up feeling very sick all day and we never managed to leave our hostel until late afternoon. The hostel was kind of weird so we thought it would be nice to get out and walk around – but our walk around Pisco was seriously depressing. It was the scariest, saddest place I have ever been in my entire life. It was mostly comprised of piles of rubble, stripped hulls of cars, mud streets filled with sickly, limping dogs and gangs of teenage boys. And we were staying in the “nice” neighborhood. The four blocks’ walk to the main square were really unpleasant (maybe made worse by a bad stomach ache and dark, overcast sky above). The main square did not really lift our spirits at all, and we hastily retreated back to our hostel, deciding that we did not want to explore Pisco any further. In the morning I was feeling better and we were only too happy to move on to Paracas.
All of the places we visited on the south coast in Peru felt pretty quiet, pretty far off the gringo trail, which was a welcome contrast from Cuzco (except for Pisco, which was TOO FAR off the trail). Paracas is a tourist town but seems like mostly domestic Peruvian tourists, it’s a pretty small and quiet place.

beautiful beach day in Paracas, Peru

sunset on the beach in Paracas

The town has only a few streets, no street numbers. It’s built along a pleasant stretch of beach, polka-dotted with bright umbrellas on sunny days, and there’s a promenade along the beach, lined with seafood restaurants and souvenir vendors selling the usual seashell necklaces and stuff. We got a quiet, breezy room on the roof of a pretty whitewashed hotel. Ate ceviche by the beach and listened to a really great old man who played afro-peruvian songs and some latin favorites (Besame Mucho, Quizas, Quizas) on guitar while we lunched. Waded in the water – Paracas is on a bay, so the water is calmer and warmer! Got caught up on work. Paracas doesn’t seem to have a real internet connection at all, I think the only connection is via wireless phone networks? There was one “internet cafe” which was tortuously slow but allowed me to get enough work done so I could get back to relaxing. In the hammock on the hotel roof, I finished the book that I’d started in the hospital in La Paz. Finished writing postcards. Felt like we were really on vacation. Enjoyed a few last days of calm and peace and quiet.
The major attraction near Paracas is the Islas Ballestas, a sanctuary for millions of birds and sea lions and other sea fauna. The Islas Ballestas are a group of rocky islands, home to Humboldt penguins, pelicans, boobies, sea lions and seals, among many other species!

pelican with penguin friends

pelicans kind of look like dinosaurs.

mama sea lion and baby sea lion

thousands of baby sea lions and parents! the sound here was incredible, they all bark and cry at once and make a giant crazy animal roar!

Peruvian Tern? and Candelabra geoglyphs

Humboldt penguins. Every year, around the time we visited, they molt and lose all their feathers, and can’t go swimming (and can’t catch fish to eat) for a few weeks. So they have to go a week or two without food while they wait for their new feathers grow back!

We caught a boat early in the morning from the beach in Paracas out to the Islas Ballestas; it was a two or three-hour trip in all. We passed The Candelabra, a mysterious geoglyph on the sand dunes (maybe created around the same time as the Nazca Lines?). It’s been there for thousands and thousands of years, nobody knows how they got there or who made them! And then we cruised around the islands admiring the zillions of birds and sea lions. It’s a sanctuary and breeding ground for many species, so visitors aren’t allowed to go on the island, just ride around in a boat. Every three years there is a legal guano harvest, hundreds of workers descend on the island to harvest the nutrient-rich bird poop that covers all the islands. The whole island has a pretty intense animal-poop smell, even from the boat. And the sounds are amazing – tons of sea lions breed on these islands, and we arrived in early summer, so there were thousands of babies and parents covering the beaches with shiny brown, flopping bodies, crying and calling and shouting – an unbelievable mass of animal noise. On our way back to town, a flock of pelicans flew overhead in V formation, then swooped down to playfully chase our speedboat – they caught up with us and swooped down beside us, cruising past the boat just inches above the water, one by one, and then flashing back up into the sky.

pelicans dive-bombing our speed boat

B R A Z I L !

I’ve been kind of obsessed with visiting Brazil since about 10 minutes into my first listen to an Astrud Gilberto record in college. I guess that lots of people around the world grow up watching american TV and movies and listening to american music and they are just obsessed with going to visit the usa and seeing it all in real life. That’s just like me only with Brazil! so it’s pretty crazy that I’ve been living in Argentina for a few years now, right next to Brazil, listening to samba and bossa nova and Seu Jorge and CSS and it took me this long to finally go visit! Anyway, we’ll just say that i was SUPER PSYCHED and filled with anticipation for this trip. And Brazil lived up to my great expectations.

We split our (way-too-short) visit between Rio de Janeiro and Ilha Grande. Arrived in Rio on Friday, super exhausted from a weird flight schedule and it was pouring rain in the city so we dedicated our afternoon to digging into amazing Brazilian eats. Fish, shrimp, sushi, pineapple, mango, passionfruit, brazilian beef and caipirinhas all appeared on our lunch menu. We had a big nap and a small exploration of Ipanema, then ate awesome thai-brazilian fusion for dinner at a fancy place (Nem Thai) in Leblon.

Saturday was less rainy, so we set out with an ambitious sight-seeing plan! We unfortunately started with going up to see the Cristo Redentor at Corcovado, which turned out to be a huge touristy amusement-ride type thing, with a looooong wait. So we pretty much spent the whole day going up to Corcovado.

It was an awesome view, though! Rio is such a ridiculously beautiful city. I want to live in a city that has crazy mountains and jungle and ocean all together! Really I want to live in Rio! but without the crazy class divide and crime and stuff.

After Corcovado we wanted to take the Bonde (street-car) from the station in the Centro up to Santa Teresa, but we had some communication problems with the taxi driver (none of us can speak Portuguese, though spanish and portuguese are so similar, we mostly got by okay with speaking spanish!) and he took us to the Bonde station in Lapa instead of Centro. Lapa is a touristy area, not a favela, but it is rumored to be a great place to get mugged, and the spot where he dropped us was like this weird, trash-strewn deserted old train platform at the end of a long twisty cobblestone alley and the whole situation seemed like a bad place for a bunch of unfortunately conspicuous gringo tourists to be hanging out. We immediately regretted having climbed out of the cab, but he was gone and we were all alone with our thoughts of the 10000 warnings everyone gave us about getting mugged in Rio and not wandering aimlessly around Lapa. We were all panicky and freaked out and didn’t know what to do and night was falling fast. We totally feared the worst of every person that walked past – but all of them just walked up and waited quietly at the platform next to us. After the LONGEST half-hour ever, the bonde finally trundled up… and it was completely full, there were people hanging off the sides and out the windows and out the door and we totally couldn’t smash ourselves in there, noway nohow. So then the bonde trundled off and we were left alone again, on this platform in the dark.

Nothing to do but wander out into the streets and search for a cab. Which turned out to be very easy. Soon we were in Santa Teresa and, still a little shaky, we wandered up to the most beautiful old ramshackle hillside mansion/bookstore/bar where an awesome samba band was playing an informal show on the front porch while people seated at card tables listened to the music and drank caipirinhas and looked out over the ridiculously beautiful view of the city and mountains beyond.

Crispy pizza and much-needed drinks were ordered, and we played a few rounds of cards while the band finished up and another band started setting up on a little stage on the other side of the house, and a good crowd wandered over to dance to their afro-samba music. What an amazing and perfect spot. Later we had another awesome dinner at a Brazilian restaurant in the same neighborhood, Espirito Santo, which also had beautiful views of the city from the back patio.

Sunday, off to Ilha Grande! We took a three-hour bus ride to Angra dos Reis, with beautiful views of the mountainy coastline in the last hour.

Then a half-hour boat ride (on the fast catamaran) out to Ilha Grande! It’s a jungly island off the Atlantic coast, the former site of several infamous prisons, but has become a tourist spot in the years since the prisons shut down. It’s totally a tourist paradise, but a tiny and simple one, lots of nature and not much development.

We stayed at a place called Sagu Mini-Resort. They picked us up at the main dock and we had a 5-minute boat ride over there. It is a totally cute and kinda fancy little place, a few cabañas and a very nice restaurant.

We spent the rest of Sunday exploring Abraao, the island’s only real town. We waded in the water (it’s wintertime so the water is not very warm, but it’s Brazil so it’s not very cold either) and wandered down a string of small beaches, had caipirinhas on the beach while the sun went down. We had to wander home in the dark, as the sun sets very early (like 6pm!) and we’d forgotten our flashlight. We had a great dinner in the restaurant at Sagu, I’ve forgotten the name but it was excellent. I had linguini with scallops and shrimp and just the right amount of garlic, which was awesome, and I am very picky about pasta.

On Monday we took a hike through the jungle that covers most of the island, out to the famous Praia Lopes Mendes beach. It was steep going and the trails were made out of packed clay, which was pretty slippery on the hills!

The temperature was a bit cool in the shade of the jungle, and then sometimes the trail would come out onto a little beach and get warmed up in the sun.

At the top of the mountain the foliage opened up for a minute and we had spectacular views across the bay, and we could see the town of Abraao and a few small beaches around the island below us.

At the top of another hill, we met a friendly family of monkeys!

luckily we had a few bananas in our pack, so we shared them with these cute little guys. We think they were marmosets. Their fur was incredibly soft, but their little hands grabbed my fingers so tightly it startled me. At first they were wary of us, but as soon as they tasted our bananas they started calling all their friends and family over, and soon we were surrounded by a bajillion curious monkeys.

We hiked for three or four hours, including a stop to drink freshly squeezed fruit juice on the beach.

When we finally arrived at THE Beach, it was indeed spectacular.

Praia Lopes Mendes is world-famous for its beauty! but because it’s so remote (and it’s winter), there were only eight or ten other swimmers and surfers dotted around the beach. Unlike the island’s other beaches, the sand was perfectly white and incredibly fine and soft. Dramatic mountains looming just beside the beach:

The sun was warm, it was perfect swimming weather and we stayed in the water until we were exhausted.

The waves were pretty big and fun to play in, and I saw the most AMAZING thing: a giant wave about to crash over my head, and in the thinnest crest of the wave, above me, a big silver fish swimming along the crest of the wave, silhouetted in the sunlight, as it broke over me! Nobody else saw it though, he disappeared after this one magical moment.

When the sun started to get low, we had to trot back through the jungle to another beach where we caught the last ferry back to Abraao.

We stopped at a beach shack for a caipirinha on our way home, and then we had another caipirinha, and then they fired up the barbecue and started grilling skewers of beef and fish and giant prawns, and we never made it home to change out of our sandy bathing suits, we just kept drinking caipirinhas and feasting on salads and grilled meat and fish as the moon rose over the beach, then finally stumbled down the beach and home to bed.

We’d originally thought we might head back to Rio on Tuesday to see more of the city, but once tuesday arrived, of course we didn’t want to leave yet. We caught a boat out of Abraao to do a snorkeling adventure at Laguna Azul, they handed us flippers and goggles and herded us on a little boat full of tourists. They took us to three different snorkeling spots; the day was overcast and there was a chilly breeze so it was really hard to get into the water, I just kept wanting to sit on the boat and huddle under my towel, but thankfully, at the final (and best) spot, I made the chilly plunge. Mike is not wimpy about the cold, so he was splashing around exploring everywhere and kept shouting “come over here you have to see this!”

I’d never been snorkeling before, and never seen a coral reef before, and honestly despite being a confident swimmer, deep water gives me the heebie-jeebies. It was hard to get used to the snorkel thing and I kept getting mouthfuls of salty water when I wanted lungfuls of air. But Mike kept saying “come on over here, I’ll show you, I’ll give you a tour of the reef, it is so awesome, you have to come see!” and soon I started to get used to breathing air while my face is in the water. While the world above water was grey and chilly, the underwater world was a spectacular and crazy fantasy waterscape of freaky beautiful fishes and bulging coral formations and undulating, pulsating seaweedy looking things that might have been flora or might have been fauna, I don’t even know. There was a loooong skinny fish and there was a fabulous fish with feathery wings, there was a camouflage fish that looked like a swimming rock, translucent fishes and zillions of stripey black-and-yellow fish, and who knows what else. When I finally surfaced and looked back, I couldn’t see the boat anymore and I was all “O god where are we, oh no! it looks like it’s going to rain, we better hurry back!” and then I stuck my face back in the water and I was all “WHOA, COOL” and forgot about going home. I was so surprised that a whole hour had flown by when the boat tooted its horn to call us back. I so wish I had an underwater camera to take pictures of all that.

Then they took us to a cantina on a beach somewhere and we got this ridiculously huge black cauldron of stewed garlicky shrimp and it was awesome.

After lunch, back to Abraao, rushed back to our rooms and packed everything in a hurry and hustled onto the last boat out of town.

We got back to Rio at 9 or 10 at night, had an amazing churrascuro buffet in Ipanema (I didn’t even eat any beef, the salad bar was so spectacular, and they had amazing pasta and sushi and seafood, and I just want to eat that every night for the rest of my life. Food in Brazil is so good!) and then after a good night’s sleep we flew home first thing in the morning. I want to go back already!

summer fun!

Andrew came to town in December! we spent the weekdays exploring Buenos Aires and making fun stuff at the studio, and we squeezed in two little out-of-town trips on the weekends. First weekend, we packed up our tent and bathing suits and headed out to Tigre bright and early on Saturday morning. I love packing for camping, I always forget something important but I love the process, making a little list and packing it all neatly in bags.

Here was our camping list:
tent
sleeping bags
bathing suits
towels (we ended up only bringing one tiny hand-towel to share between the three of us. oops)
deck of cards
flask of whiskey
books to read (Eliza: A Clash of Kings by George RR Martin; Andrew: Dwelling Portably, 1980-1989; Mike: Blood Meridian
candles
matches
chocolate bar
bananas
tin foil
apples
tomatoes
onions
sweet potatoes
cheese
dried pasta
butter
bread
peanut butter
chips
water
beer
cook-pot
forks
sharp knife
plastic bowls and cups
bug spray
sunscreen
shorts
sweater

We took the commuter train up to Tigre and caught a ferry out of Tigre, up the river about an hour into the leafy delta, and got off at an island with a humble little boy-scout-camp type place called IMOS. I believe it’s a municipal campground. As soon as we got our tent up, we put on our swimsuits and jumped in the river!!!!! Sweet sweet cool summer river water. Splashing and paddling and somersaults ensued, followed by lazing in the sunshine and beer and card games in the shade. We found sticks and Andrew made a magnificent campfire, I jumped in the river one more time, and we feasted on smoky roasted potatoes and onions and pasta. Went up to the camp building and played a round of pool. Fell asleep to the sound of mosquitoes and cumbia dancing. In the morning it was rainy, we stayed pretty dry in our tent but we didn’t stick around to frolic in the river as I had hoped. To get home, you have to go sit at the end of the dock and wait for a ferry-boat to go past, and wave it down. There didn’t seem to be any schedule, we just had to go sit out there for what turned out to be a few hours before catching the boat back home.

The following weekend, we took a 1 am bus out of the city, headed for Mar Azul, a tiny little town on the Atlantic coast south of Buenos Aires. We fell asleep and woke up in the small beach city of Villa Gessell at 7 am. Caught a local bus and rode down a dirt road through a string of little beach towns, Mar de las Pampas, Las Gaviotas, and Mar Azul. Last year we’d spent christmas in the same area, in Mar de las Pampas, but we headed for Mar Azul this time because it seemed like a tinier, quieter, more relaxed spot. We had backpacks and sleeping bags but no tent and no idea where we’d be sleeping at night. We took a walk around the campground, then wandered down the main drag checking out the jumble of beach houses. We caught sight of the cutest little tiny A-frame cabins near the beach and we were in luck, the owners happened to be right there and were happy to rent us a cabin for the weekend.

So, we spent christmas sitting on the sand, jumping in the waves, strolling down the beach, dutifully applying and re-applying sunscreen.

This year there were more people on the beach, but it was still far from crowded. The sun was hot and the water was suprisingly warm. There was a strong wind and lots of big big waves and a strong current. And moments of total summer fun and contentment, sitting on the beach and playing in the waves with two of my favorite people in the world. On the last day, we saw two or three orca playing in the waves just a hundred yards out from the beach! We could see their black and white markings as they jumped in and out of the waves.
I really wish we could get back to Mar Azul (or any kind of summer swimming spot) again this summer but it’s pretty hard to get around with two dogs and no car…

can’t keep up!

Lots of exciting and awesome things have happened in the past few weeks/months, and all of these exciting things have been keeping me very very busy. Too busy to blog! I’d like to go back and write a more detailed entry about each of these things, but for now here’s a quick list:
-October: weekend at the beach in Uruguay with Julia and friends.
-November: taking Level 5 spanish course at the University of Buenos Aires aka La UBA
-November: got the worst flu
-November: Amy Sawyer came to visit, yaaayyy!!
-November: 8-day trip to Salta and Tucuman provinces in the north of Argentina
-November: nice mention of Morris & Essex on Design*Sponge, which brought me tons of card orders and wholesale inquiries! i’ve been working like a sleep-deprived madwoman to fill wholesale orders and keep up with it all. I am my own sweatshop.
-December: adopted a new puppy! we wanted a friend for Emmylou Elbows, who seemed terribly sad and lonely and scared all the time. new puppy is adorable and fearless and nameless. we’re thinking of calling her Inga Josefina.

uruguay beach weekend

ok, i’m trying to catch up on some good stuff that I’ve neglected to write about in the past few months… In October we took a nice chill weekend at the beach. Mike had a day off from work for “Virgin Day” or something like that. Argentina has so many national holidays. Julia invited us to come to Uruguay with her; we took a ferry across the river to Uruguay, arrived in Colonia and got right on a bus to Montevideo. I’d been napping on the ferry and was still totally groggy when we walked out into the terminal; I immediately crashed straight into a giant pole (it was painted white and everything in the room was white, i didn’t see it!) it hurt so bad and it scared the bejeezus out of me, i was so groggy and confused I spontaneously burst into tears and then i felt very embarrassed about a) being clumsy/oblivious and b) crying like a baby, but luckily nobody seemed to notice, or at least nobody pointed and laughed at me. We got into Montevideo around 10 or 11 pm and met up with Julia’s friends Eugenia and Antonella. We ate some dinner in Montevideo and then took another bus, headed north up the coast, around 1 am! An hour or two later we asked the bus driver to drop us on the side of the highway in the middle of nowhere around 2 or 3 am. It was beautifully cool and quiet and deserted and dark. We walked about twenty minutes, through a tiny seaside town, to get to the rental house next to the ocean. Dropped off our backpacks and walked on out to the moonlit beach!
The town is called La Tuna, somewhere between Montevideo and Punta del Este, where the brown Rio Plata water mixes with the salty Atlantic Ocean.

……..So we spent a few days chilling and doing nothing, walking on the beach and reading and drawing. The beach was really quiet, just a few fishermen and occasional families playing in the sand. I jumped in the water once and it was super chilly! I guess Uruguay in October is about like Maine in June…
Antonella staged a video shoot on the beach, lots of her friends came out for the afternoon and they acted out some kind of live-action Super Mario video art with lots of jumping in the sand dunes. Then we had a typical giant asado, lots of beef and sausages, crusty bread and fresh salad. They had these delicious sweet blood sausages that tasted like fruit and cinnamon! Usually blood sausages are too creepy for me to eat (they’re called morcilla here) but these ones were just so tasty, I couldn’t get enough. We made lemon squares for dessert.
After a big thunderstorm the sun peeked out through the clouds and there was this amazing light on the wet deserted beach.
Muchissimas gracias a Antonella, Eugenia y Julia para invitarnos!

Mar de las Pampas

This weekend we had a few days off for the holiday so we took our first trip to the Atlantic coast south of BsAs. Although Buenos Aires is technically a port city, it doesn’t have the kind of relationship with its water that most port cities do. It’s not a city built around the water; I only catch a glimpse of the river every few weeks and I miss the water. I miss boats and tides and seashore! So I was looking forward to exploring the Atlantic coast relatively near the city. The biggest beach city is Mar del Plata, but we wanted less city, more nature, so we looked a little to the north of there, and went for a cabin in Mar de las Pampas, a few miles south of Villa Gessell. I would’ve loved to camp, but we weren’t sure how to secure a camground reservation and don’t have a tent yet.

The towns of Villa Gessell, Mar de las Pampas, Las Gaviotas and Mar Azul are all in a line along the sandy Atlantic beach. They were just sand dunes, still drifting, until enterprising developers bought the dunes and planted pine forests to stabilize them, with the idea of creating peaceful little towns in harmony with nature. Between the nineteen-thirties and the sixties they developed into picturesque little vacation towns and became famous hippie towns in the sixties and seventies.

Now Villa Gessell, the biggest, is a city of high-rise tower blocks looming over the beach, while Mar de las Pampas is a posh little vacation town with a kinda Hamptons feeling (complete with little wooden shopping malls and a Havana store, the Argentinian version of Starbucks). Mar de las Pampas is touted as a “slow village,” with unpaved roads and 30km/hour speed limit to encourage walking, but we found an awful lot of cars and not a whole lot of walkers. There are also a lot of kids on four-wheelers zipping around the beach and town, which was noticeably un-peaceful. Las Gaviotas and Mar Azul are smaller and seem less overdone, a bit less posh and commercial, a bit more nature. Beyond Mar Azul is just sand dunes and forest.

The combination of wide beaches, pine forests, sand beach roads and posh cabins reminded me of Fire Island. Sitting by the water, looking towards the empty end of the beach, it looked amazingly like any beach in Maine.
Anyway, we had a nice weekend, both went swimming a bit (the water was a bit warmer than Maine! but there was a stiff breeze all the time), took long beach walks and cooked tasty dinners in our little cabin. We found some camp-grounds right next to the beach in Mar Azul, so I like to imagine that we might come back again with a tent, as I could have enjoyed the beach quite as well without the Kountry Kute cabin and the posh restaurants.