Around The World In 80 Waves

Today’s surf trip did not start very well. I had not gone more than a mile from the hostel before I had been pulled over by a motorcycle policeman.

It appears that the local carabineros took a dim view of me turning left into a one way street then proceeding to drive the length of it travelling in the wrong direction scattering pedestrians as I went, all of whom had understandably been looking the other way when they tried to cross the road. 

The situation was not aided by me not being in possession of either my passport or driving license at the time, and because of this I thought it best not to explain that I had been taking this picture of the wonderful Chilean Naval Headquarters building during my erroneous manoeuvre!

The policeman then followed me back to my hostel, but after I produced the necessary paperwork he was good enough to let me off with a warning and the suggestion that I be more careful.  

On of the locals I have met had suggested I head for Maitencillo, as opposed to the two breaks which are available a short distance north of Valparaiso.

It was a glorious day and I was delighted to arrive and only see a handful of people in the water there, unlike the hundreds I had seen at the beginners beaches on the way past. 

This was going to be my last surf in the Americas and I wanted to go out with a bang.

The waves were about chest high and although a bit cold the water was beautifully clear.

I caught loads in the late afternoon sun and this is probably the best picture of the day. 

I was about to get out quite pleased with myself when the Americas provided one final surprise for me.

A Humbolt Penguin popped up next to me in the water. Now you know you must be quite far south when that happens!

The little bird then hung out with me in the line up for about five minutes. He was swimming around and underneath me, all the while checking me out, whilst I basically did the same in return. A wonderful experience that I suspect will never happen again in my surfing career!

I knew that no matter how good the waves were I would not top that, so caught a last wave in and got changed.

It was a fabulous way to end my time in the water on this side of the Pacific, and as I drove back to the hostel I couldn’t help thinking about the animated movie about surfing penguins ‘Surf’s Up’.

A quick pitstop to buy pizza and beer on the way home, and I then had a great evening  basking in the days events. I can admit to getting more than a bit wobbly from drinking the Stella Artois and some Jack Daniel’s supplied by Natalia who runs the hostel.

The Atacama desert in the north of Chile is the driest place on earth and as a consequence has clear skies on 360 days a year.

This and the altitude of the desert that is 5000m up in the Andes makes it perfect for Astronomy, and a number of large telescopes are already in place there. 

The Atacama Large Millimeter/sub-millimeter Array (ALMA) is an astronomical interferometer of radio telescopes and is the project which has taken away funding from the UK’s Infra Red Telescope that I saw on Hawaii back in December. It consists of 66 12-meter and 7-meter diameter radio telescopes observing at millimeter and sub-millimeter wavelengths.

It is the most expensive ground-based telescope in operation, but ALMA is expected to provide insight on star birth during the early universe and detailed imaging of local star and planet formation.

I don’t have the time to go and see this science marvel but to be honest would settle for a clear night because since I have arrived in South America it has been overcast everywhere I have been.

The southern sky will be keeping me company for the next five months and I want to try and pick out these constellations.

Maybe tomorrow night!

The British owner of the hostel I am staying in here in Valparaiso told me something I should check out out at breakfast this morning, so I went off to see if it is true.

The first thing was an elaborate drive to find the fish market, which is adjacent to where all the local boats come ashore. 

The fish are gutted straight off the boats so they are ready for sale, and you can ask the fishermen for a bag of entrails, heads and spines.

Take my word on this, it is at least as grotty as it sounds!

You then take your bag of fish bits along the fishermen’s jetty and then peer over the side at about 11am. 

The local sea lions have long since realised that the fishermen will be throwing their waste over the side when they finish work at this time, and turn up regular as clockwork looking for an easy meal.

As a consequence the whole group of them will then follow you up and down the length of the jetty, all the while barking at you to throw more fish guts their way. Despite ending up with fingers that are not at all pleasant it is so much fun and really worth the effort if you are ever in this part of the world. It is like getting to take part in feeding time at the zoo!

After landing in Santiago Chile I picked up my hire car, but only after:

• Having to try and sleep stretched out on my surfboard on the floor of the airport as the cleaner repeatedly went past my head with an industrial buffer
• Waiting more than three hours for the AVIS office to open despite all the other being open through the night.
• Refusing to accept the 50% increase in price they tried to add onto the booking I had made online.

I then drove to Valparaiso, which is a short distance away on the coast. Chile is actually quite wealthy compared with most of Central and South America and you can see that in the wonderful buildings throughout the town. 

Almost all of them are painted with bright colours, which makes and impressive sight stretching up the hill away from the ocean.

To save wearing out their shoes on the cobbled roads leading up the hills throughout the town thirty of these ‘Ascencores’ or funiculars were built for he benefit of the population. 

Checking out this view from he street outside my hostel you can see why the novelty of the daily climb up the hill would inevitably wear off.

Thankfully I have my hire car to make scaling the hills completely painless, but I have to say that the vivid colours of the town are like a breath of fresh air, even at times if some areas are a little dusty.

The locals have spiced things up further however by adding graffitti to a great many areas around the town.

From what I can gather it is embraced rather than being frowned upon because it adds to the character of the place.

Such a funky town!

The TT races on the Isle of Man back in the UK start this week. It is as absolutely bonkers as motorcycling gets, but I want to wish all the riders successful racing.

I went to see it when I was 8 years old and have been fascinated by motorcycles ever since.

The racers average in excess of 130mph on streets and mountain roads around the island, and sadly there are regularly deaths on the course.

If you want to know more about it I can whole heartedly recommend ‘TT-Closer To The Edge.’ The starting sequence will give you the general idea: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVMLv5It6Bk

Conor Cumming’s activities that year will tell you the rest: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y07yt87lhEA

It is the dry stone wall that kills me every time, but apparently not Conor Cummings!

Chile is the final country of my American odyssey. It is 3000 miles long and never more than 200 miles wide.

It stretches from Peru all the way down to sharing Patagonia with Argentina (although sadly not the Welsh speaking areas which I would love to have seen on this trip.)

It’s recent history is dominated by Augusto Pinochet who was the leader of the military junta who doesn’t seem to have had the best interests of his country’s population at heart.

Far more entertaining however is the wonderfully named Bernardo O’Higgins Riquelme the Chilean independence leader who is considered one of the country’s founding fathers. He was the first holder of leader of a fully independent Chilean state. O’Higgins was of Spanish and Irish ancestry.  

All this is wonderful stuff but we all know why I am here.

This picture of two guys managing to catch a 150 foot wave off the Pacific coast of Chile was taken earlier this year.

I’m not sure I want to be out seas quite that big, but think you would be walking on air after bagging such a monster. We will see what I am offered.

I am heading off to the airport today but had just enough time to bag one more break before I go.

I opted for Playa Makaha near the Miraflores area of Lima where I have been staying. I took this picture a couple of days ago when the weather was altogether more pleasant. 

When I got into the water there this morning however it was very cloudy and the wind was messing up most of the waves.

I was trying my utmost to have another dry hair paddle out today because it would delay the inevitable cold air on my skull, and I think that I probably got through this one with my boufant intact. 

Once out past the broken waves I was trying to get on some of the right handers that it is possible to ride towards the restaurant on the pier. You get so close to the restaurant that you can almost order a meal as you whizz past.

I bagged a load of fun rides which were anything up to about chest or shoulder high, but the sea was a bit of a mess today and it was really difficult to pick the decent waves coming through. 

It was quite tiring too because the waves were so messy that you never got the chance to relax, but a fun session to end my stint here in Peru.

I’m not sure what was going here because I am not normally camera shy, however I think my anti paperazzi pose might have been a reaction to all the wildlife that kept popping up.

There were loads of fish jumping out of the water around me and comorants kept popping up beside me unannounced. There were loads of illuminescent jelly fish on the beach, which were quite big and I am happy to report that I didn’t end up with one of these wrapped around my face despite a few close calls.

In an effort to get ahead of the game I took all my laundry to the local Lavandria at the start of the week. Getting it all cleaned now would mean I did not have to worry about it again until I was over the other side of the Pacific in New Zealand.

I handed over a huge bag full and was told to collect it later. When I returned the following day I was handed a bag of cleaned, dried and ironed clothes for the princely sum of 16 Soles, which is about £4.

It felt a bit light when I picked it up but I didn’t think much of it and only discovered later that none of the whites I had handed over had been given back to me. Clearly not very impressed I walk back there and ask for my clothes back, but am met with blank expressions and little in the way of garments.

I was joining Javier and and Manuella for a farewell dinner a short while later so recruited Javier’s assistance in explaining the situation when he arrived, and he kindly pointed out that I would quite like my T-shirts, vests, underpants and socks back! However they are nowhere in sight at the laundry and have been given to somebody else in the interim. I am eventually offered 50 Soles to replace the clothes which wouldn’t even buy one of the T-shirts, but the ladies will offer nothing more. We are wasting our last night together so I begrudgingly take the note promising to return the next day and see if anything has been returned.

We then get back to hostel we are appalled to discover that Javier’s car has been broken into whilst he has been playing the good samaritan.

Thankfully he had taken his laptop out before we left but for some reason they have stolen a bag of his clothes which was in the back of the car.

Now we are both pissed off, but try not to let it ruin our night too much and after a Pisco Sour, which is a wonderful local drink made with egg white, have a lovely meal at a Chinese restaurant where we are joined by Javier’s brother and his wife before saying a fond farewell.

As with all the Aztec, Olmec and Mayan ruins I missed through Central America I am not going to have the time available to go and see any of the Inca sites here in Peru.

The Inca Empire was the largest empire in pre-Columbian America. The administrative, political and military center of the empire was located in Cusco here in Peru. The Inca civilization arose from the highlands sometime in the early 13th century.

The most famous of these sites is Machu Picchu located high in the Andes, but there are a great many more that I would have like to have seen had time allowed. 

It is not to be however, and at the end of the day they are just piles of old rocks. Very  spectacular piles of old rocks, but just piles of rocks all the same. 

I had also hoped that when I flew south to Chile I might catch a glimpse of some of the Nazca lines through the aeroplane window.

The Nazca Lines are a series of ancient geoglyphs located in the Nazca Desert in southern Peru. 

The hundreds of individual figures range in complexity from simple lines to stylized hummingbirds, spiders, monkeys, fish, sharks, orcas, and lizards.

The lines are shallow designs made in the ground by removing the reddish pebbles and uncovering the whitish/grayish ground beneath. Hundreds are simple lines or geometric shapes.

The largest figures are over 200 metres across.

However because my flight south will be taking place at night I have no chance of seeing any of them.

It would seem that the closest I am likely to get to any of the ancient worlds of the Americas will be drinking the local Inca Kola.

It is as popular here as the usual colas would be back home and tastes a bit like cream soda.

It isn’t fortified with anything funky as I believe the original Coca Cola was. The clue is in the name as to what the real thing really was!

Lima was founded by Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro only forty years after Columbus had discovered the Americas and the city became an important element of Spain’s empire on the South America continent. It was the capital and most important city in the Spanish Viceroyalty of Peru.

It flourished as the centre of an extensive trade network which integrated the Viceroyalty with the rest of the Americas, Europe and the Far East.

All these global influences can be seen in the wonderful architecture to found all over the city. It is quite the most impressive that I have seen since heading south from the USA.

As usual I have taken a guided tour bus to ensure that I see as much as I can in a short time period.

The buildings are amzing and there is a colonial charm to be found all over the city, even if some of the buildings are looking a wee bit tired.

This is the monastery established by the Franciscan monks.

I was taken on a guided tour of the catacombs underneath the building and was rather surprised to see that all the bones of those who had been interred there for centuries have been laid out in ornate patterns and eloborate piles.

It was a bit macabre for my tastes and I dont think I would want tourists gawping at my remains three hundred years down the line, so can’t imagine that the residents of Lima would have felt any different.

The tour was good though and it was great to be shown around a city unlike the endless getting lost that I experienced through Central America.

I saw all the sights of the city going around on the tour bus this afternoon, but nothing was as impressive as Beatrice’s smile.

Beatrice works on the reception desk at the hostel I am staying in and I have been having lots of fun trying to tempt her out for drinks, whilst she tries to convince me that aliens and giants are responsible for some of the ancient structures worldwide.

I have not had any luck yet, but will be in town for a few more days yet, so you never know.