Life As Canvas

Beach. Long stretches of golden silky sand under waving palm fronds and sparkling aquamarine waves lapping at our toes – is what we had in mind. So we set our sights on Mancora, a little surfer town in the north of Peru, where the getting was said to be good. As we have no guide book (and like it that way) we asked around a bit, just to be sure.

“Mancora?” The ex-pat Frenchman shook his head. “Don’t go there. Skip it. It’s just dirty and full of drunken people who all run out into the street when the bars close.”

Our dusty, beach-thirsty backpacker hearts broke. But the curiosity in us couldn’t help it and we went anyway. We got to town around 6am and took a moped taxi to some cabañas on the edge of town. Bamboo walls and grass rooftops, sand and palm trees, hammocks everywhere, 10 bucks a night for the both of us.

There is no hot water, but this is a good thing when the sun cooks the sand and everything in between and a cool shower is about the best thing you did all week.

We watched the sunrise as a few joggers bounced by and the first surfers came out to take advantage of their solitude in the waves.

Mancora. You can sit on the beach and watch the surfers bob in the waves while the birds float above them, have some ceviche (which I avoid, lately) or other seafood delights, or take a taxi for a buck to another beach called Organos and walk South until you’re the only one there, lay down in a long stretch of sand, and let little crabs scuttle by, coming up to inspect you and then shying away into their holes. But the best part of the lazy day in Mancora is the sunset. It begins a long marmalade smear across the horizon and then bleeds intense orange into the foaming blue waves below.

The off season in Mancora. It doesn’t boast the Caribbean’s glowing teal waves, but it’s clean and friendly… and we stayed an extra day.

Next stop: somewhere in Ecuador. Either mountains or mangrove. I’ve got two weeks left on this continent and Ecuador looks like it’s full of things to do. Luckily, it’s a small country.

Alone on the hotel terrace, I sit nursing the little thunderstorm of rocky love in my heart. I can see the Pacific Ocean, a great churning mass of slow changes over time. It’s misty out, the sun is setting, and the waves look stone grey against the light clouds behind them. Near the horizon moves the silhouette of a local man fishing in a traditional boat made of reeds. It’s curved up in the front, making it look like an elf shoe. He goes out on this ocean, the same as it was centuries ago, to find dinner in the same kind of boat his ancestors used, though judging by his cumbersome maneuvering, a kayak would be more practical. But it’s simpler than that. The way he’s fishing is just the way it’s done around here, and has been done for generations. I ask myself what kinds of complications and troubles of the heart this man has. From here on my terrace looking out to his horizon, it just looks so simple.

Peru is overwhelmingly full of things to do and see, from jungle to desert, ocean and high mountains, all of it scattered with ancient walls and palaces belonging to the ancestors of the Inca who still live here. Today the Inca hassle you with their taxi offers and order you to enter their restaurants (Adelante! Adelante!). As a gringo, it gets tiring fending off their pleas. But when I look beyond the things placed in front of me to those who still fish and farm, to the friendly man who sold me an Inca Cola in the Colca Canyon, a man who lives in a village of 5 people and farms cactus for the pigment it produces, these lives seem so much simpler and, in ways, more authentic than my own.

I’m going to leave Peru for Ecuador in a few days, meandering up the coastline until the border and then following the Panamerica Highway to some new Gringo Paradise. Ecuador’s currency is the dollar. I fear that farther north this simplicity will be harder to find.

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