Final Week!

From Piura a three hour bus took me to Chiclayo, and from there a ten hour bus took me to Chachapoyas- arriving at 4:50am. Ronal didn’t arrive until 5 so in the mean time I slept, showered and read my book, all very interesting. For those who don’t know, Ronal is a friend from Lima, his family owns the hostel my DWC group stayed at this year and last year. Once he arrived we caught up and exchanged stories about the past month and a half.

The next day we took a very crowed taxi to a town called Huancas, about 20 minutes outside Chachapoyas to see a canyon. It was huge! There was a river running right down the middle, and Ronal thought we should go swimming, I contested. We walked around the mountains for a while until we got to a dead end. Then we made a fire. This probably kept us occupied for an hour. First we put rocks around the outside as shelter from the wind and stacked some small sticks in the middle and lit them on fire with a lighter (cheating, I know). But the sticks burnt really quickly so we kept having to go find more and throw them on the fire before it burnt out. Eventually we had a pretty steady fire burning, and when we were done we made sure to put it all the way out.

When we got back it started pouring rain and we got in a combi to go to Tingo. Okay this combi was so horrible, there was probably 13 other people plus the driver, it was hot, wreaked of some fish/body odour type smell, and this child beside Ronal would just not stop moving. During the ride he looks at me and says, “Never I think I kill a child…” By the time we arrived in Tingo the rain had finally stopped and it was so amazing to breathe fresh air. We stayed at Ronal’s Aunt’s house, but as soon as we arrived we went to someone’s house/restaurant to watch the Semi Final Copa America game, Peru vs. Uruguay. Peru lost. It was the weirdest thing, all the guys that were watching would buy beers, but they would buy them one at a time and then have a glass or two going at a time. So one guy would pour a glass of beer, chug it, and then pass it to the next guy. This carried on the entire 90 minutes of the game…Peruvians…

The next day we had to go on a hunt for breakfast because each little store in the town only sold certain ingredients we wanted. One store had bananas, one had avocados, mandarins and water, and one had bread. And when we returned to the house to put everything together, the house lady had made us breakfast. After breakfast we went on a journey to Kuelap. To get there we had to take a car for one hour along the side of a mountain. Kuelap is an ancient ruins site, pretty much the remnants of an old city. It takes about 40 minutes to walk there once the car drops you off. Once we got there we walked around it for about 3 hours, we stopped and ate lunch in one of the old houses, we made  pretend tour guide videos, and talked to llamas.

Our final adventure up north was a hike to Gocta. According to the Peruvians, is the tallest waterfall in the world, but when I looked it up turns out it’s only the 5^th tallest. It takes about an hour and forty five minutes each way to hike there. Also, it’s a good idea to arrange transportation for the way home before you do the hike because there are no cars or motos waiting to take people back. So how did we get back might you ask? We hitched a ride with a tour bus to the turn of, about 11km. From there we had to wait for passing cars to see if anyone could take us. After waiting about an hour with no ride, we started walking and only a minute later a combi came by with two spaces!

The next day we had a twenty hour bus ride to Lima from Pedro Ruiz- on which they serve meals- one of which was a whole fish (tail and everything).

And the next day I was on a flight back to Canada... 3 months sure goes by fast!

I'm going to be continuing a blog throughout the next two semesters to post information about upcoming fundraisers and events happening to support different organizations and causes.

Thanks for reading :)

Crossed the border once again, back in Peru!

After many hours of travelling I am back in Peru! – But back tracking a bit. On the 14^th I arrived In Banos, a town full of hot springs, waterfalls, adventure sports, surrounded by jungle. Every block has at least one tour company trying to get you to sign up for bungee jumping, rafting, cannoning, jungle expeditions… etc. Since I hadn’t gotten to see any of the Ecuadorian jungle I decided to go on a one day jungle tour. (This is when I should have booked it for another day, and registered for my upcoming school semesters- and now all the good classes are full) Anyway, our first stop was a money rescue center. This place had different types of monkeys, and other animals such as anteaters, just wandering around and we were able to pick them up and play with them. It was so awesome, they were so cute and friendly, well except for one who climbed on a man who had his kid on one of those backpack  carrier things  and stole the kids lollypop! He actually ran away with it in his mouth, just like in the movies.  At our next stop we visited a native community of about 90 people- all one family. And from there we all got into a canoe and went for a stroll down the river for 30 minutes to our lunch destination.  Lunch was at a riverside campground sort of place that you would stay at if you did a 2 or 3 day tour. After lunch we went for an hour’s walk to a waterfall where we could go swimming. Along the way our guide pointed out many different medicinal plants and the different types of bugs you can eat if you’re stranded in the jungle. He also showed us a tree that has the ability to move 3meters over its lifetime by growing new roots in certain directions. After the walk we hiked up 230 steps to a “mirador” or lookout. Here we had an amazing view of the river and the jungle that we had just been exploring. Overall a great day!

The next day me and a friend went for full body massages and manicures at a place in town (for only $20) before I had to start my journey to Loja – which is where I would be catching another bus to Peru.

Not so simple. From Banos I had to take a bus for just over an hour to a town called Ambato, where there are suppose d to be many bussing going to Loja passing through. Well, sometimes lonely planet can be wrong. I got there and the official company did not have a bus until 5:45am the next day. I walked down the street a bit to another company and asked (in Spanish) if they knew anything about bussing to Loja. There were two other people waiting for the same bus as me at this company and they said one should be along in about ten minutes. Well, ten South American minutes went by, no bus. Finally one comes and it’s already overflowing with people so we aren’t able to get on that. Also, I might point out, we aren’t at a bus station, we’re on the side of the road with all these random people trying to catch busses. We have to wait another hour and a half (on the street) for the bus, one comes by and doesn’t take us, another comes by and doesn’t even stop. Finally around  9 a bus lets us on. However, they are also completely full and there’s already two guys standing. We slept in the aisle for the majority of 10 hours.  One thing that was cool was while we were waiting we just ate street food, sat on the street that smelled like pee, listened to music from a shop and a guy trying to sell the new Harry Potter movie. So authentically South American.

We arrived in Loja around 7 in the morning were able to catch another 10 hour bus almost right away going to Piura.

I’m right on schedule for meeting Ronal in Chachapoyas on Monday. Having left Lobitos almost two weeks ago, I’ve thought about my time there every day since I’ve been away from it. I miss it way more than I thought I would. I miss helping at the school, the people in the WAVES house, and being by the beach (sun!). I miss the Christmas lunch twice a week, and the random things that made my time there so unique. It’s interesting because during my first week in Lobitos, all I wanted to do was go back to Lima and continue with my experiences there. I never expected that I would feel that way about a totally different experience with totally different people. And although it sucks not being there anymore and feeling this way, it’s worth it to have had such an amazing experience and such great memories to look back on.

If I wanted snow, I would have stayed home.

Montanita was cool. It’s got the same vibe as Mancora but with bigger waves and more hippies. I even recognised some people that I’d seen Mancora weeks earlier hanging out in Montanita. Everywhere you go travelling hippies are selling their jewellery and other trinkets.  Oh ya! In Guayaquil, we met this couple who had been on a cruise to ANTARCTICA! First of all, I thought only scientists were allowed to go there, and second of all… what the heck that is so cool!!

Anyway, so a couple days ago I took two busses, the first one leaving at 5:45am, to get to Quito because people say it’s awesome. Well after 12 hours of travelling I was slightly disappointed. Firstly I thought we were going to all get robbed on the bus. Sometimes the busses stop and people are allowed to get on and sell things and whatever. This dude gets on and just starts talking to everyone from the front of the bus kind of aggressively. But you know, my Spanish is limited, so I’m all confused. And then I swear he said something about iPods… so I’m like shoot this guy is going to hold up the bus. Then he lifts up his shirt and I can’t see over the seat in front of me completely but he’s got some white tape on his stomach. So then it’s official in my mind he’s got a gun taped in or something. He walks down the aisle and obviously I needed to see for myself. GOOD NEWS, no gun. But he had a big scar down his stomach where I thought the contents of his stomach might erupt from, and the tape was covering a bandage- and, he was just begging for money.

As you might have guessed I arrived safe and sound in Quito and freaked out for no reason. I got to my hostel and since it was dark and Ecuador was a very spur-of-the-moment-I-have-no-idea-what-to-do-when-I-get-to-a-big-strange-city, sort of trip I watched the season finale of Grey’s Anatomy! Yup I’m all caught up now!  I met an Australian girl at this hostel, she was a little weird.

Yesterday I wandered the city, it was boring, I saw nothing. Seriously I just took pictures because I felt like I had to. Thankfully, I had plans to meet up with someone that Deborah (another WAVES volunteer) put me in touch with for drinks. So me and this other new friend I made went and did that.

This morning I was up at 6:15am to go on a hike/bike trip to see the most famous volcano in Ecuador, Cotopaxi. Ya there was a snow storm. We could only hike to 4400m instead of 5000m. Should have done the horseback riding, that’s all I have to say about that.

Border crossing at its finest

Our bus crosses the border into Ecuador, we’ve passed through the immigration office and are on our way.

First the bus gets searched for drugs. The police find about 3 kilos of marijuana in body board bag on the bus. Everyone on the bus has to get off. They separate the people in the police courtyard into three groups.  There was one group of people who got on the bus at Piura (all older, Peruvian looking people), one group of guys who got on at Mancora and one group of girls who got on at Mancora (young, backpacking gringos).  Antonio, Christian and I got on at Mancora. So the guys were all spaced out by the police cars and the girls were allowed to sit together.  They checked tickets and baggage tickets and asked anyone if the body board bag belonged to them and no one claimed it. We sat around for a while, they strip searched a couple guys, and then they let everyone who got on the bus at Piura back on. Then they slowly picked apart the remaining people and let everyone else back on except 9 people. The three of us had to stay along with two girls who were travelling together, and four guys, three of them were together and one was Peruvian (who was only forced to stay because he was sitting beside Christian on the bus). When everyone was getting back on the bus the police told everyone to shut their curtains so they couldn’t see us. Kinda weird hey?  So we’re all forced to sit spaced out with our bags in this courtyard while the police investigate and three of the guys had to sit in separate cells. The two girls have their bags searched first and the police find about 400 grams of marijuana in their bags and the girls are all “I’ve never seen that before in my life…”  So then we just sat around, and by 9am they let the other guys out of their cell things and we were all in the courtyard. Then we had the bright idea to call our embassies.  An American guy calls from his iPhone, and one of the girls calls the UK one from the police phone. When I went to call the Canadian one, they wouldn’t let me use the phone and said we had made too many calls already. So according to the embassies we are in a federal case and one of us is guilty so we were not allowed to leave and they can hold us there for two days if they want to. So now it’s about 11 am. For breakfast they asked us to give them money and they brought back chips, oreos, brownies, soda crackers, coke and peach juice from a kiosk outside. Around lunchtime they did the same and they came back with maria cookies, coconut flavoured cookies and vanilla wafers. Anyway, so as soon as they let us move around again, the three guys travelling together were talking and I  hear them talking. Two of them are telling one guy “man no one’s looking, take it out of your back, put  it in your pocket and go flush it.” So I look up and sure enough this guy is over by his bag putting something in his pocket and he walks over to the washroom. Later on this guy admits to Christian and I he had something on him coincidentally but he’s flushed it and the body board bag is for sure not his. Antonio and Christian were being used as translators by the point 2-4pm, and this is how we have so many details. So the bus lady told the police that she saw one of the guys (the one who “coincidentally” had drugs on him) handling the body board bag. So now the three of those guys are the main suspects and the two girls are just in trouble for whatever they had on them. So Christian has to go with the 5 of them as a translator to a meeting with a lawyer, judge, police and the bus lady. Turns out the girls are getting 30 days in the Ecuadorian jail and two of the three guys have a sentence too, but we don’t know how long because they didn’t use Christian’s translation for that part. 8pm rolls around and we’re allowed to leave. We also find out from the other policemen around that the three guys tried to point the finger at Christian and blatantly tried to blame the whole thing on him: saying that the body board bag was his.   

18 hours later we’re on a bus on our way to Guayaquil. Checked into our hostel at 2am, we were supposed to arrive at 6 in the morning. And the boys caught their flight back to the sates at 2pm that day.

After a day in Guayaquil I’m heading to Montanita today with a girl we met at breakfast yesterday. At least we don’t have to cross any borders to get there.

Two Months!

Two weeks later….

I’m going to Ecuador tomorrow!  My month in Lobitos has come to an end and I’ll be home in three weeks tomorrow. Over the past two weeks I’ve been working on nutrition guide for the locals to help them choose healthy foods and prepare healthy meals. There is a table that mimics the Canada food guide, but the food examples are all foods they can find locally here. So there’s no tofu or bagels on the menu. To further explain the table, I made a seven page nutrition guide to explain vitamins, minerals, different foods with their nutrition content, an explanation of foods to avoid, and an explanation of what type of people should eat what  e.g. people who are pregnant.  Other than that, I’ve still be helping teach English three mornings a week, and going to help out with the surf classes. Not to mention, taking my own surf classes with other volunteers.  Having more volunteers in the house has been great and now there are only two of us left; once again I’m the only girl. Oh and yesterday a random boy asked if I would take a photo with him.

My plans for Ecuador go something like this. Tomorrow, not sure what time, getting an overnight bus to Ecuador with two guys I've met through WAVES. We end up at Guayaquil, Ecuador sometime on Wednesday. We get to hangout for one more day and then the two of them fly back to the states and the solo travelling beings! There's a couple of cities I've looked into visiting, and at most I've got two weeks before I need to be back in Peru for some travel time with Ronal. How and where I'm meeting him I don't know, but we're gonna make this happen. People seem to have good things to say about Ecuador so I'm just going to hope for the best and go with it.

International Surfing Day

June 2oth marks the 7 annual International Surfing Day! This is the first time that Lobitos has been able to participate in this event and it was a great success! This event is used to promote the sport of surfing, however it also is used to promote being "ocean minded" and doing what you can to protect the ocean. SO we had a beach clean up! las Capullanas is a beach about 15mins by car south of Lobios. Its a gorgeous beach with sand dunes and caves, but its covered in garbage because of the next town over, Talara. We had 40-50 people show up for the event, including kids, parents, surfers, and of course the WAVES volunteers. We collected about 2o bags of garbage collected, I even found myself a little keepsake. I found a sea lion, or in spanish "lobo" vertebrae. I think it may end up being a donation to the WAVES house because I'm probably not allowed to bring back foreign animal bones into Canada. At the end of the event we had a draw for prizes that had been donated by surf companies from the states and Europe, overall a pretty good day.

The Road Way Less Travelled

I remember talking about my trip to Peru this year and mentioning I would be volunteering at an NGO in Lobitos after my time in Lima, and I remember no one having any idea about where Lobitos is.  Now I know why. It’s in the middle of nowhere. No restaurants, markets, bars, stores, traffic lights, and they there’s a population of about 1200 people. They have a beach with world class surfing. This doesn’t mean much to me yet because I only get to surf the baby waves, and even those are rough here.

I arrived on June 6^th to an empty volunteer house, besides the two guys working here at the moment.Sidetrack for a second. My adventure getting here went as follows. 6 am flight from Lima, so its my first time flying in a counnty on my own where I don't speak the language. So naturally, I want things to go as smoothly as possible so I get up at 2:45am, in the cab at 3 on the way to the airport. For those of you who know about the traffic situation in Lima, it doesn't exist this early in the morning. I arrive at the airport at 3:25am for my 6am flight. They aren't even letting us check in this early only 15 minutes before the alloted check in. Once they do I get through fine and arrive at the gate, which is still unknown, its gate 1-7. The plane ends up leaving about a half an hour late, with no announcement of course. AND it makes a stop halfway without even telling us until we are leaving the gate. Only in Peru... So ya. Went from the capital city of Peru living in a house with 9 friends and some local friends, to a town with only cold showers and corner stores.  My days here are not so “9-4” anymore. Instead I get up around 7 everyday, Tuesday Wednesday, Thursday I help teach English at the school across the street and afterwards I work on random projects (if there are any) and if not I just “chill.” We eat lunch each day at the house of one of the local people, this way, families can earn a little extra money, we get fed, and we get some interaction with the locals that we otherwise would not have.  

Last Wednesday another volunteer, Casey, arrived. She’s from California, and she’s come to teach a couple surf classes. So Wednesday and Thursday of this week we’ve got all girls surf classes, and on Friday there’s a boys class. Lobitos is a town dominated by guys. All the guys we see around town are surfer guys, and the girls are mostly pregnant, or with children at home. So this surf class is awesome because it’s going to get the girls in the community excited, hopefully stoked on surfing, and it’ll give them something to do after school in their own backyard. The organization I’m working with WAVES for Development, uses surfing to get kids out and about utilizing the waves in their own backyards to surf. Without it they wouldn’t have the resources to do so. Volunteers also set up their own personal projects that help benefit the community in some way.

Next Monday (June 20^th) is international surfing day! Its based out of the states of course, but they are promoting surfing and also keeping the ocean clean. So they’ve sent us a bunch of surfing swag and we’re doing a beach clean up at a nearby beach that is filthy because of the pollution to the ocean from the surrounding town.  

I’ve had my first real food poisoning/ traveler’s sickness experience here. It was horrible, not getting into details.

So to make up for it Casey and I went to the town of Mancora for a night. It was awesome. This lovely surf town is situated about one hour north of Lobitos. It’s such a happening place, known for its partying and beaches. We arrived there Saturday afternoon, first thing we did was eat at the most gringo restaurant we could find which happened to be called “Green Eggs and Ham.” Oh the comforts of home.  Afterwards we strolled around the markets, and of course went to the beach. The next day we were up at 7, after a visit from some friends of ours getting home at 6 in the morning, and we went surfing. Well we tried, but we had been told they opened at 7 or 7:30. We were there at 7:45 and literally nothing was open…  no surf huts, not restaurants, no stores. We wandered the town a bit and realized on a Sunday of a party town such as this people generally had a late start. We didn’t have to wait too long and found something open at 8 for breakfast. So by 9:15 we were in the water catching our first waves in Mancora.  We got lucky and caught a ride home with some friends, who then had us over at their hostel in Lobitos where we had some disgusting sandwiches they insisted we eat and afterwards we watched some surf videos. ­