Pisco

I boarded a bus in Lima at 10 am and headed for Pisco. I saw many interesting sights during the 4-hour trip. Basically on my right there were long and sandy beaches and on my left the desert and mountains in the distance. Sometime we passed small towns. Some of them are very poor shantytowns build by a group of people who came from the center of Peru - that's what I learned from a person running a travel agency in Pisco. The vastness of the desert is amazing. Miles and miles of sand and the beach and just a road cutting in between. In some places it got mountainous and duneous. It looked like the road number 1 in California except there were no cows grazing and no green color of any vegetation in vicinity. Only sand. Occasionally there was a chicken farm. I got to Pisco at 2 pm, got into a hostel, went for lunch and then to visit the church of San Francisco. It seems the most beautiful churches are those built for the San Francisco order (these in Pisco were also Jesuits). It's not functional. There's only what remains of the interior but there are no benches or any services going on there. The church undergoes restoration - it doesn't look like it but that is what I was told by a person collecting money for visit. He was napping outside under the tree and I had the whole church to myself. It's not a big church. Its altar and side altars are beautifully carved, beautifully. It's really disintegrating but there's so much charm in that disintegration. The gold peals off, the brick floor is chipped, the paintings are dark with age. It's quiet and musky (I tried to go down to the small catacumbs but the smell was so pungent that I turned back, it was also dark there so...). The only noise is the sound of, excuse me, copulating pigeons. Lots and lots of them, sitting everywhere - on the top of the altar, the main cross, the frames of the paintings (so the musky smell of an aging building is accompanied by the smell of bird poop...)... doing their amorous dance... Perhaps it's their "park of love" or maybe they are inspired by the frivolity of the sculptures of breasted angels. Have you ever seen an angel with breasts? I haven't. This is the first time. I would never suspect Jesuits would allow this... But there are other peculiar things in this church. The base of the main altar looks as if it was influenced by art from Bali - the color and style of the carvings and the little mirrors embedded into geometrical shapes very much resemble it.

I then took a collectivo to St. Andres which is not listed in my guidebook and that's why I precisely wanted to go there - local people told me about it. I most love the places off the beaten track. It's 15 minutes away from Pisco. It's a fishing port so I went to the fish market, looked at different fish and shellfish, talked to the fishermen, looked at their boats (very small ones), watched kids swimming and playing soccer on the beach. I watched the sunset on a beautiful beach and had cerveza Cristal at a local cantina. I learned that the fishermen are not doing as well as they were a few years ago because the consumption of frutti di mare dropped in favor of chicken, hence the chicken farms on the coast. What a pity. Frutti di mare is so much healthier.

Tomorrow at 7:20 am I will be picked up by a collectivo which will take me to Paracas National Park and Islas Ballestas where I am most likely going to swim with sea lions and maybe even dolphins, see various migrating birds, grotos, arches and caves on the coast.