Mancora

¡Hola!

We have arrived in Mancora, a small beach resort on the Pacific in the North of Peru. We left Cusco and its stunning colonial architecture and its hundreds of tourists and tourist traps behind, and after a 36 hour coach trip (19 hours from Cusco to Lima, two hours stopover in Lima, then 17 hours from Lima to Mancora) across a stony desert dotted with villages of wooden sheds sprinkled with garbage which seems to constitute the coast of Peru, we finally reached our destination.
We were quite surprised to arrive in a place full of persistent "tuk-tuks", which we hadn't seen since leaving South East Asia, and we were also quite surprised to find dolphins swimming a few metres from the shore!
This is the Peruvian version of Surfer's Paradise ; we exchanged the women in bowler hats for tanned girls in bikinis and long haired guys carrying their boards under their arms.
The weather is hot and sunny and there isn't a lot to do here : it will be perfect to recharge the batteries before visting Ecuador, or maybe we will just decide to stay here for three weeks until we fly home!
You will be pleased to hear (at least mums and grandmas will be) that our diet is undergoing considerable improvement. It was constituted mainly of empanadas (kind of cornish pasty filled with meat or cheese) and super panchos (hot dogs) in Chili and Argentina, where they were the only thing we could afford ; chipas (cheesy bread) in Paraguay ; but it got better in Bolivia with the discovery of the set lunch which for a few bolivianos includes at least some vegetables... Now it has got a LOT better in Peru : here you can have lunch and dinner for 3 to 6 soles each (50p to 1 pound) and for that price you get a drink, a starter, a soup and a main dish. here in Mancora we have been feeding on freshly squeezed fruit juices and seafood. The local specialities are "ceviche" and "tiradito", both are dishes made from raw fish marinated in lime juice. Yum.
The local dishes in Bolivia would often be based on llama or alpaca meat. In Peru a party meal usually includes roasted guinea pig!
¡Hasta Luego!