June 23: Paracas

So I got completely ripped off for the first week I was here in Peru. My Spanish consisted of about 19 lessons from "Barron's Vamos A Hablar Español" which I had picked up sometime in December and halfheartedly gave a couple stabs at in the intervening months. This means I could talk only in the present tense (to talk about something in the past, I would say the equivalent of "Before, I am walking in the park") and my list of adjectives was pretty much limited to sizes and whether something was pretty or not. I was in a strange country, alone, with a limited grasp of language and I was TERRIFIED.

Rip-Off Number One: Cruz Del Sur. Cruz Del Sur is a big bus company down here in Peru. They are renowned for their safety (they actually film all passengers as they board the bus, because a couple of their overnight buses were robbed some years ago), their comfortable seats, and their on-board entertainment. They are also hugely expensive. I ended up paying $18 for a four hour bus ride that should have cost me $8. Ten dollars may not seem like much, but the equivalent 30 soles can get you either a hotel room, three square meals, or two souvenir T-shirts. I highly recommend Cruz Del Sur for the agonizing overnight bus trips from Nazca to Arequipa or from Puno to Cuzco. I do NOT recommend them for small jaunts from Lima to Paracas. Although we did get to watch Stranger Than Fiction on the bus. And every bus ride also has a game of Bingo which awards a bottle of pisco (Peruvian brandy, quite strong, used in making a drink called pisco sour which tastes like margarita) and a free future ride. The Bingo game was good for numbers practice anyway.

The Weird Divide: Rich limeños (Lima people) often summer in the little seaside town of Paracas. Their mansions are kept secreted away behind a white wall with a gate and a guard. The bus dropped the tourists off inside the wall, and I had to walk back to the other section of town to my hostel. It was only half a mile, maybe a seven minute walk, but I with my rucksack was hounded by tour touts the whole way there. I started by refusing them but eventually gave in and booked a hostel and tour with the most persistent one, a guy named Carlos.

Rip-Off Number Two: The Paracas tour. Because I booked everything through the hostel, I ended up paying a hefty commission to Carlos and Refugio del Piratas, the hostel I chose. It's a much better deal to go directly to the dock to book the tour, where the boat captain's will end up seeing more of your money. And the Paracas National Reserve tour is rather dull, so unless you're really into sandy expanses of nothing and long ceviche lunches, you may want to skip it. I don't regret seeing the reserve but it certainly didn't make my top ten list. This is pretty much the view for miles:
And this is their big tourist draw, Cathedral Rock. Doesn't look like much of a cathedral, huh? And to think the tour guides call the Reserve "The Poor Man's Galapagos." By poor they mean completely destitute.
And this is where you're more than likely to have lunch. The ceviche really was fantastic, despite some cautionary tales about people catching hepatitis from raw fish in Mexico. I had the sea bass. And Carlos actually drank the lime broth like it was soup.
You'll see lots of pelicans and gulls and maybe a nice sunset.
While waiting for the sunset, I met a Shane from Ireland who was on a six month halfway-round-the-world trip. Although his tour was completely booked and mine was completely the opposite, we would continue to run into each randomly from Paracas to Arequipa, proving that every single gringo really does stick to the Gringo Trail.