The Beach

Brad has been wanting to surf Peruvian lefts for months now, and the other night he found a surf hostel--the call them surf camps- in a little beach town 45 minutes south of Lima called Punta Hermosa. We took two combes (little Peruvian street buses) out of Lima and onto the Pan American Highway that cuts down the south coast of Peru through the sand and desert. These buses are small, but we managed to squeeze into one, backpacks and all while it weaved in and out of traffic. Every stop the door opererator slams open the bus door yelling the names of his stops and rounding up customers before jumping back in just as the bus peels out. The towns that line hte highway are bussling and active. There are settlements everywhere, a testament to the crazy growth this area has seen in the last decade or two. There are towns perched precariously at the top of sand dunes, and others perched precariously at the bottom...The houses are simple brick sqaures with windows, and in every commercial area there is a building supplies store, where you can buy the walls of your house already built.
We soon begin to leave the bussle with the bus driver joking that we´ve already passed Punta Hermosa and so we´ll have to go to the other Punta Hermosa. We´re dropped off in the middle of a dusty town where we grab a moto taxi telling him to just take us to Caballero beach. We have a a vague idea the hsotel is near there but want to look around just in case. He drops us in the middle of a dead town and the only hostel in sight is closed. I start ¨expressing¨ to Brad that he should listen to me when i say I want to stop to figure out where we´re going before we pay to go there. We´re walking aorund aimlessly when we see 2 women walking. One turns out to be Brazilian, with a house next door to the hostel and she walks us there, winding through little beach homes and dirt roads telling us about her family. She leaves us at the entrance telling us that she lives riiight around the corner.
I´ll skip the hostel part...Surfers everywhere are pretty much the same, so when i say I was at a surf camp, you can imagine there was reggae, guys in beanies, weed, and not a single girl except for the cook. Brad got some surfing in, I enjoyed an awesome sunset, and we met an American and Brazilian who were both super nice and willing to go out with b to catch some waves.
To my friends reading this who were with me in Brazil, I´ll say, the other guys at the hostel were very ¨jui-jitsu-y¨
We´re back in Lima today, not sure if we want to continue down the coast or head right into the mountains.

To be continued.....