Temporary Nomad

As if our border crossing into Ecuador wasn’t bad enough, the return to Peru was even more horrendous. We were quite lucky to escape with only a severe case of sunburn and extremely sore shoulders.

Strangely enough, this time there was an actual protest, but it didn’t close the border itself. Instead, the road between a town called Arenillas and the border town Huaquillas was blockaded, in some kind of local dispute. The result was that the bus for Huaquillas was forced to stop at Arenillas and everyone on board, us included, had to walk around huge roadblocks made of trucks, earth and the remains of burning tyres all the way to the border, with luggage, in the equatorial sun – in what turned out to be a three hour trek. No traffic whatsoever was allowed through except the trucks and cars of the organisers, which we had to watch passing us by loaded up with supporters shouting slogans as we trudged along, weighed down by our heavy packs.

The road to Huaquillas – snapped on my phone. The road looked a lot longer than this in real life! 

As a result of this excruciating ordeal I suffered pretty severe sunburn and Mike’s arms were so badly rubbed by his backpack straps that he got blisters, but we kept on walking, and finally came to the final roadblock, a little way out of town.

We at last arrived at Ecuadorian passport control only to find a queue forming and no-one staffing the counter for “Salida del Ecuador” – exiting Ecuador. After waiting for half an hour in the sun, the news gradually trickled through that their computer system was down, with an unknown wait until it was fixed, which turned out to be yet another hour queuing in the sun.

Having left at 9am on what was meant to be a 2 hour journey we finally arrived at our destination Tumbes in Peru at 3:45, with 15 minutes to spare before our flight check-in time.

The moral of the story is – whatever you do, steer clear of Huaquillas.

Well, we’re not really walking in Darwin’s footsteps, but you do get the sense here of evolution in action. Many of the islands are incredibly young – in some cases less than a million years old. They’re formed by volcanic activity, so they’re entirely made of lava, and you can see the gradual colonisation of the islands by plant and animal life.

Isla Bartolome is only 800,000 years old, and it’s mainly just lava:

Other islands have more vegetation, but mainly in the form of cactuses:

And the animals are ridiculously fearless, and weird. We saw a sea lion that had given birth only hours earlier trying to teach its pup to suckle, while frigate birds fought over the placenta a couple of metres away.

Not the newborn sea lion.

Even more amazing is the contrast between the desert-world above and the teeming riches beneath the water. On our snorkelling trips we saw enormous numbers of fish, but also sharks, sting rays, sea turtles, sea lions and marine iguanas. The sea lions even come up and swim with you – when they’re not playing games herding the fish.

And Mike managed to snap this shot of a sea turtle in among the mangroves:

We´ve just spent 3 days on a Galapagos boat cruise. Amazing landscape:

Lava! 

 And amazing wildlife:

 Marine Iguanas.

These are just a couple of examples, more photos on Flickr.

Well, now we know we’re really in South America.
We’d been lulled into a false sense of security in Lima. Staying in Miraflores, we might have been in any southern European minor capital.  We’ve been eating in affordable but top class restaurants like Las Brujas de Cachiche  (well, that was a treat for Mike’s birthday, but the Ceviche was superb and I enjoyed the baby goat too, better and cheaper than Nobu and with Pisco Sours all round) and drinking sours in trendy bars like Ô. But outside Lima is another matter entirely.
The first sign was our flight with AeroCondor up to Tumbes in northern Peru from where we planned to cross the border into Ecuador. But on landing in Piura en route, the plane started to seem a little ramshackle:

Yes, that’s the emergency exit sign dangling in the aisle. Actually, a panel above someone’s head fell open as well and nearly knocked him out, but the staff got to that before we could get a photo. However, we landed safely in Tumbes only to be scammed by the taxi driver taking us into town.

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A few random impressions of Lima.

People paragliding off the cliffs at Miraflores, coordinated by a woman wearing a live iguana, like a parrot, on her shoulder.

Cheap and tasty food, including bright purple corn made into drinks, dessert, or sold fresh, and chili on or with or in everything.

Yet another change in the traffic circulation. We’ve now gone from driving on the right in The Netherlands, left in Britain, right again in the US, left again in Barbados, and here we are in Peru and it’s back to driving on the right again.

Back in New York again, this time staying with marvellous hosts Ellen and David Levy, who live in the West Village.

Ellen is a bioartist who shows her work in a Chelsea gallery run by Michael Steinberg, so she has great access to the New York art world. Plus she’s a New Yorker born and bred, so has plenty of insider information. So, our first day there we had a visit to the excellent Chelsea markets, where the locals do their gourmet food shopping, but without the Dean & DeLuca prices.

But, again we were in New York for the art, so we went along to an art show at the Armory called 212 – this turned out to be a professional show with Chelsea gallery owners showing for collectors, and checking out each other’s goods. Funnily enough one gallery from Adelaide was showing: Greenaway Gallery.

Later we also saw a show in an experimental performance space called PS122 – A Room of One’s Own, by Coco Fusco, but it was rather disappointing. Ah well, we made up for it with dinner with a huge bunch of Adelaideans visiting New York at Next Door Nobu. Super Japanese food, but we knew to expect a big bill when I realised I’d actually even heard of Nobu.

More art in the form of the Neue Galerie, which was in the news recently for its acquisition of the Bloch-Bauer Klimts bought from the family after they were returned to them just this year after being looted by the Nazis. The portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer was the highlight,

but again I preferred the landscapes, especially the Birkenwald.

And then it was time for the last big New York museum – The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Wow, again fantastic – 5 Vermeers, some really nice Cézannes and Van Goghs and plenty of other old masters. Like the Louvre we could have had another day there easily and still not seen it all.

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