Huanchaco

We took the 11 pm night bus so we could delay our departure from Mancora as long as possible.  (Without an agenda, we would likely have stayed another week or two, which seemed to be a very common result.)  The beauty of the night bus – if you can get some sleep – is that you save the cost of a night’s lodging.  We arrived in Trujillo at 8 am, but had been warned by many to avoid this mostly industrial town, so we took a cab to another little beach town called Huanchaco.

I guess this is where the term “sleepy” beach town comes from:  at 9 am on a Saturday, there is no one to be seen, on the beach, on the pier, walking the streets.  We settled into the only café we could find open and threw our bags into a room they had open on the 3^rd floor.  Fifteen minutes later, they remembered they were booked full and needed us to move back out.  We did not pay for the coffee.  Bastards.

We settled for a room at the bar where we were going to watch the USA v England match later.  Seemed wise at the time.   (Seemed less wise at midnight with the music thumping and people streaming in and out of the baño 5 feet from my sleepy head.)  The owner of the bar also runs a soccer training school for kids and played professionally in the US for many years.  Great guy and obviously one of the social centers of the expat community there.  Despite the annoyances, a good experience.

Thank GOD England’s keeper has hands of stone or I would owe pisco shots to half of The Commonwealth.  We had a great time watching the game with a room full of Brits and mocking their pain.  We Americans are such vulgar beasts.

This was an intermediate transit stop of only 2 days/1 night, but we did also squeeze in a trip to our first archeological site, the ruins at Chan Chan.  Certainly worth a Google Image Search.

Two weeks in, there is certainly a wealth of great experiences to list, but there is also a lingering sadness in moving from place-to-place every couple of days.  The faster we move, the more it settles around me.  There is always beauty and exhilaration in discovering a new place, meeting new people.  But as the parting becomes routine, the intimacy of those experiences naturally wane.  I feel more disconnected each day, not only in place, but also from myself.

And for all the benefits of traveling with my little sister, there is a world of needs, desires, and experiences in those 19 years between us.  We want different things from the road in front of us, and there are times when we simply can’t make each others’ paths easier.

As Piter so presciently pointed out (at 3 am) on the beach in Mancora, there are many different kinds of intimacy, and I’m worried that the path I have chosen does not allow for the kind of intimacy that I am truly craving.  I left a lot of love behind when I got on that plane in May.

As usual, I have been far too aggressive in trying to see everything possible in the time allotted.  We have already blown off parts of our itinerary and are now considering blowing it up altogether and spending a week (instead of 2 days/1 night) in the Cordilliera Blanca.