We escaped the chaos of Lima for the warm and clean waters of Peru’s North Shore. The trip was a total of ten days, four of those days were spent driving a total of 2000kms. Our travels took us from Lima to Huanchaco on day one, then to Vichayito, Mancora, and Zorritos for the bulk of the trip. We had the time to stay one day and night in an old military town famous for its surfing called Lobitos on our way back towards Lima.
At our first stop in Huanchaco, we were greeted by perfect waves and a beautiful sunset. We climbed to the highest point in the town to get a view of the sunset as it finished. Huanchaco is very much a tourist town known for its surfing and its boats called Caballito de totora which are thought to be one of the first known surf crafts. The town certainly had its own charm to it, and we were told that many people come to Huanchaco and never leave. Perhaps they go on a surf vacation and decide to stay a little longer, and that turns into three years or more. I guess it is a pretty common thing there.
On to Vichayto tomorrow…
We started the day early to make our way further north toward Mancora. If you’re in Peru and you have more than one week here and want to see more than Machu Picchu during the summer months, I highly recommend Peru’s far northern shores. Mancora is kind of the central Florida in terms of popularity of it’s beaches, so we mainly stuck to the quieter shores of Vichayito and Los Organos. We were fortunate enough to stay in a perfect open-air bungalow for a few nights, falling asleep to the sounds of big crashing waves made the chaotic trip to get there very much worth it.
We moved on to Zorritos for a day of visiting with family and taking in the beaches there. Zorritos was equally as beautiful and had ten times less of a population than the Mancora area, a nice change. This was our last destination before heading back to the south towards Lobitos.
Lobitos was a very interesting and desolate town. The town is situated very much in the middle of nowhere, we drove roughly 15kms from the main highway on essentially what was barely a dirt road in order to get to the coastline of Lobitos. This place was first inhabited due to that fact that it is rich with oil beneath the surface of the landscape. There were massive oil pumps dotted throughout the landscape of the desert on the way to Lobitos and also in the town itself. I was told by a local that the Queen had an estate there that was built in the early 1900’s, he pointed it out as we drove by. Our night transformed into drunken debauchery rather quickly as we were staying with my girlfriends cousin who rarely has friends or relatives come through his small surf town. Needless to say, we didn’t leave early the next day for our half way point stopover.
Dan Buchanan 