Gracias y Chau!

I’m sitting at Guayaquil airport in Ecuador waiting for my flight to Madrid. After which I get a flight with Ryanair to London. It’s weird looking back on the last 5 months. It feels like a really long time ago that I was walking into Heathrow to catch my flight out to this continent. I think this is because I’ve seen a massive amount of new things and met lots of new people. Yet on the other hand it’s strange that I’m now about to get on a plane back home. It’s probably all standard stuff in the world of vagabonding, but it’s definately a weird feeling.

So what have I learnt?

Well, the aim of the trip was to learn spanish and surfing. I’m happy that I’ve accomplished those goals. I know I’m not fluent. I know I’m not a pro surfer. But, I can do both to a level I’m happy with. I’d forgotten how fun it can be to learn new things. I think when you go to uni, the pressure of trying to get through it can take away from the fun of learning. Trying to learn new things is fun and can help you get a new perspective on life. It has been helpful learning something physical and something mental at the same time because progress in one motivates more progress in the other. So in summary I’m committing to learning new things in the future.

Next thing is “poco a poco”. This is Spanish for “little by little”. I’ve mentioned this on here before but before the trip I’ve always been a person that wants instant results. The experience has taught me that you can get results if you chip away at something, and that results are not always instant. This phrase was used alot by one of my Spanish teachers and is something that has stuck in my head. It’s all very tortoise and hare but I needed this trip to really take on board what most people probably realise earlier in their lives!

And lastly, I’ve experienced a healthier lifestyle out here trying to master the ways of surfing. This is something I’m committing to maintaining. It’s made me feel much better eating healthy food and exercising regularly and is something I want to maintain in England (even if that exercise sadly doesn’t always include waves!). A friend took some photos of my penultimate day of surfing, and above is one of them. Something I hope to look back at to remind myself about the fun I’ve had!

Thank you for reading my blog. I’ve very much enjoyed writing it, and again thank you for reading. Chau!

Pusiste una huella en mi corazon

It´s been a couple of weeks since I last posted. In that time I spent a week in Montanita at the Spanish school doing some more classes and obviously doing more surfing. At the Spanish school here they change the teachers around. You have a grammar teacher in the morning then a different conversational teacher in the afternoon. It´s a nice way of doing it, compared to be wacked with 4 hours in the morning like most other schools. The teacher in the afternoons was quite eccentric and had us reading out Ecuadorian horoscopes. She then sidetracked into teaching us lots of spanish pick up lines or ways of telling girls you like them in poetic spanish – v funny! For example, the title of this post means “You put a footprint in my heart”.

The waves in Montanita are pretty mellow. The water´s warmer too so you only need a rash vest. I was riding a few sideways a bit which was very satisfying.

Then I travelled up to Canoa more north. Canoa is a much quieter place than Montanita. I also bumped into a hippie Chilean girl who I´d partied with in Huanchaco. It was partly because it was full moon, but the waves in Canoa were pretty difficult compared to Montanita. Much faster, messier and lots of water so you feel like you are constantly paddling.

Somehow I managed to find a ridiculously cheap ticket to Madrid. I think it´s on account of the tragedy that happened to the Air France flight. So I´ve decided to come back to England. Deciding to come back was a difficult decision to make. This is going to sound very technical but in my years of doing computer things I learnt about something called “scope creep”. This is essentially when the objectives or requirements of a project increase as time goes on. You start off wanting a project to do a certain thing, then you start to want to add loads of extra bells and whistles. Essentially I´m at that stage at the moment. I came out with the objective of learning how to stand up on a surfboard, and how to spend an evening hanging out with Spanish speakers. I can do both of those things pretty competently now (although writing that here probably means I´m going to fall off the surfboard every time I try and surf this week!). As you get better at both things you get a thirst for more, and you start to realise how much more you want to do both (ie scope creep). The flip side is that I want to come back and see my family and friends, but I´ve been beating myself up about returning because I feel like I want to learn more surfing and more spanish. I´ve decided that I don´t want to become a victim of scope creep, and that I shouldn´t beat myself up about returning. And this is why I ended up booking my ticket.

I´m going to spend the next few days hanging in Montanita trying to ride as many waves as possible, then on Wednesday I get a flight to Madrid. Then on Friday I get a Ryanair flight to London.

Banana country!

On Saturday night I travelled up from Peru to Ecuador. I´m now in Montanita which is the surfing mecca of Ecuador. The journey was pretty tiring. It was about 20 hours of busing, along with several taxi drivers trying their absolute hardest to rip you off when you change bus companies. One guy was trying to convince me that the bus company I needed had shut down and that I needed to take a taxi for 25 dollars with him! Turns out the bus company was alive and kicking!

It´s interesting the change as you travel up. The north coast of Peru is essentially a desert with very little vegetation. As you travel to Ecuador there´s more and more. Where I am now is almost like a jungle near a beach. It´s because of this vegetation that Ecuador is meant to be one of the worlds largest importers of bananas. In celebration of this I made myself some plantain mash this evening!

On the face of it Montanita is a bit like Ibiza for hippies. The main strip is full of hippies trying to sell you friendship bracelets and hand woven sandals. Then it also has tonnes of bars pumping out music until the wee hours. Not all bad, but a bit intense to live in (and study in, because I start my Spanish school tomorrow). So initially I was sceptical about the town, but today I found a great hostel 10 minutes walk from town and am about 50 metres from the beach. All rooms have a hammock outside too. Potentially the best beach hostel I´ve stayed in yet!

Hit the surf earlier and got quite a shock because the water is nice and warm. No wetsuit required. It´s a bit weird because I´ve got so used to surfing with a wetsuit, so it feels a bit odd only having a rash vest and swimming shorts. Good odd, mind. The waves were a bit messy but apparently they are due to improve. Still rideable but they don´t have the consistency of Huanchaco. Apparently the best times to surf are 6am and 3pm at the moment. Going to try and head out tomorrow at 6am if I´m feeling hardcore enough!

A hard week

I have spent the best part of a week in Chicama. I went there full of enthusiasm for the waves there, and hopeful that I might be able to catch the big one. Unfortunately the waves and the rip current were just too strong for me. You enter the water at one point, and by the time you reach the point where you can start surfing, you are about 200m along the beach. So you spend alot of time paddling. On top of that the waves have alot of force so trying to catch them without getting smashed to pieces is pretty hard too. Been hanging out with an english guy that I keep on bumping into at Chicama, and it seems that in general you can have good and you can have bad weeks at surfing. Well this week was certainly a bad week and my confidence was dashed pretty hard. Anyway, I think I needed that to bring me back to earth a bit. Yesterday I popped back to Huanchaco to ride the waves there to remind myself I can still actually surf at least a small amount! Now waiting for a bus to Ecuador. Heading to a spanish school near a beach. Ive realised that I need to up my game with the spanish and the surfing. I can stand up on a board, and I can chat to a local for an evening. But I want to ride across a wave, and I want to have more spanish fluency like knowing all the different tenses. So more practice is needed with both!

Moto videos!

It´s day 2 in Chicama. Yesterday I moved down a board size and surfed alot so my entire upper body feels like it´s going to fall off! There a couple of German surfers staying in the hostel too. They´ve been surfing for about 15 years and more recently have been doing a surfing tour around south and central america since November. The bonus is that one of them is a fitness instructor so they´ve been telling me all the things I´m doing wrong in the water which is just what I need. Surfing is definately a sport that gets more fun as you get better at it, so any advice from these guys is much appreciated.

Apparently a monster swell is on it´s way. Starts tomorrow and builds until about Saturday. The word on the beach is that there are going to be barrels! Awesome!

Anyway there´s not much else to do in Chicama other than surf and eat rice, so I´m taking the opportunity to upload photos and do the facebook friend adding thing. So, as promised are two videos of moto driving. Rodrigo (my moto driving instructor!) kindly filmed me driving around El Milagro in Trujillo. Then there´s a video of his mates doing stunts on their motos. I hope you enjoy the videos. It was definately fun filming them! Oh, and I keep on saying the word “chevere”… FYI this means “cool”.

Driving around:

Stunts:

Thank you Huanchaco, the town that taught me surfing

Today I left Huanchaco. I´ve been in the town for about 6 weeks and I´ve had a great time there.

On the surfing front I had about 20 days in the water, and now I can stand up most of the time. The hard bit now starts, because you have to start learning which waves to catch and when. When you first start standing up you generally ride the white water after the wave has broken. But ideally you want to catch that wave before it breaks, then you can start to ride it sideways which is way fun. I´m gradually getting the hang of this and a couple of days ago I rode one sideways for a couple of metres. Problem with trying to catch it before it breaks is you need to paddle much faster, and also you run the risk of the wave just dumping and breaking on top of you if you catch it a little too late. So I´ve also swallowed alot of sea water these last couple of weeks!

The volunteering side was really interesting because I saw several different things which gave me a good overview. I´m not sure how much I helped anyone really, but I guess something (even if small) is better than nothing. I worked doing construction at the local shanty town school which was interesting just seeing how the school works and how you go about building things especially when you don´t have all the tools (by the way if anyone wants some tubing put underground, then wants electric cable run through it, then I am your man!). The language school was a real eye opener in terms of how hard it is to teach something well and in a fun way. Then this last week I´ve been helping out volunteer organisations website, and also helping with putting together a marketing plan. It´s interesting because in my opinion to run these sorts of things efficiently you need to think of it a bit like a business. How to get volunteers effectively is a similar question to how to get customers effectively. It was also seeing how this all relates into the admin side too. When I return to England I want have my own business so it was good food for thought seeing some of the complexities you can come up against.

I would like to volunteer again, but in my opinion you really need to do it for about 6 months as a minimum. I think this allows you to build a relationship with whoever you are volunteering with, understand the culture and ultimately help more. So if or when I do this again I intend to se aside this amount of time for it.

Then lastly I´ve been lucky to meet some great people while doing this. To name a few…. A really cool French guy, a hilarious couple from Norway, the family and girlfriend of Luis, the 3 legged cat (who ended up sleeping in my bed the last few weeks) and possibly the cutest puppy I´ve ever seen called Doll (who also slept in my bed a fair bit – I´ve been starting to feel like Dr Dolittle!)!

It´s with a heavy heart that I left, but I just got to Chicama (again). It might be dark but I can still see the waves beautifully breaking across the beach! Going to stay here for a few days and do my best at riding this bad boy! Then planning to snake my way up to Ecuador for next week to do some more intense Spanish lessons (my conversational Spanish has improved alot these last few weeks but I´m lacking alot of grammar still so I really want to blitz this).

My first weekend in Chicama

This weekend I went to Chicama with some of the guys I have been volunteering with. It is 2 hours north of Huanchaco and has the longest left hand break in the world. This means if you surf with your right foot forward it is really easy. What an amazing break. It wasnt fully working (every couple of weeks when there is a large swell it lasts 3km!), but still the waves were much better than here in Huanchaco mainly because they break more consistently. The board selection was quite limited there so we switched around a lot. At one point I was using a 6 footer. Up until now only used 9 foot so the jump in difficulty was pretty hard (smaller boards are harder to paddle on, harder to catch waves on, harder to balance on, and ridiculously knackering!). It was good though because it forced me to up my game a bit. This morning I switched back to a 9 foot board and I caught a couple of waves where I managed to surf across (rather than just forwards) a little bit for about 10m. Wow what an amazing feeling. Bottom line is, I want more. So am thinking that I will stay in Huanchaco for a couple more weeks and train much harder, then go to Chicama and stay there until I crack it! Heres a cheesy youtube video so you get a taster. Hopefully the next video you see will be of me riding along this amazing wave! We had fun partying there too, but to be honest all that is eclipsed by the amazingness of this wave!

Typical Peruvian Cuisine

So I wanted to do an update on this blog because it´s been a little while since I last posted and wanted to account for the time in between. In honesty not much has changed since my last post. I´m still living in Huanchaco this little fishing village in the North of Peru.

This week I started teaching. Much harder than I thought it would be. The thing I´m finding hardest is the crowd control. Some of the classes they´re ok, but the first class is harder because they don´t want to learn as much. So respect goes out to my sister and every other teacher out there. As much as you want to, it´s sometimes hard to empathise until you put yourself in their situation or shoes for a bit. So I feel like I have a little bit more empathy now about how hard it is to teach.

Spanish and surfing are both starting to come on. The motion of actually standing up is gradually becoming muscle memory so I can do it almost automatically when I feel a wave is taking me. Still though as I think I´ve been saying with alot of posts I write about both topics, it´s a case of poco a poco eg. little by little. I´m probably going to stay in Huanchaco for a good few weeks more, because there are some fun people here and the waves are perfect for learning. It seems to be a place that enchants alot of tourists in this way. I met some English girls staying in this amazing apartment with a swimming pool that overlooks the sea… for only 90 pound a month! They came in December with the intention of staying for a month. It´s now May, and they have plans to stay for another 6 months at least.

I´ve been living with Luis and his family. The other day his daughter Ali taught me a typical Peruvian recipe called “Causa”. I know that I´ll probably loose the book I wrote it down in so here goes. This recipe should serve about 4 people.

Boil some potatoes and carrots up. Then mash them together but use lime juice when you are mashing it. Don´t use milk or butter or anything like that.

Cut up an onion and soak in some salt water for about 10 minutes to make it a bit more bitter.

Cut up some celery into little chunks.

Remove the onion from the water. Now mix it with the celery, 2 cans of tuna, and if you want some precooked bits of chicken. Now add a good helping of mayonaise to bind it all together.

Now get a big plate and spread out the mash on the plate a bit like a base. Then put the celery/tuna/onion mix on top of the mash. Now spread another layer of mash on top.

That´s it! You don´t need to grill it or anything. Tastes delish. The celery adds a nice kick to it.

You can also make some aji to go with it. To make aji just cut off the shell from about 2 or 3 or more peppers. Then put in a blend with a jot of water. Then blend until it becomes a sauce. Tis nice and also healthy, has quite a kick too!

Tom the Tuk Tuk driver

Today I met up with Rodrigo who lives in El Milagro, on the other side of Trujillo. Essentially the deal is that he wants to get a job on an American cruise ship. Ive met a fair few people round here that either work on these cruise ships or want to work on them. You get paid $75 a month, but most of the money is in tips. The take home ends up around $1000 a month Im told. Plus you get the obvious benefit of cruising around the Carribean and Hawaii! So relative to some jobs here its pretty good pay. Problem is, to get the job you need to be able to pass an English fluency test. So for a couple of hours each week we sit in the main square where he lives and chat in English. Hes lived there all his life so its funny because he knows absolutely everyone.

In return he is teaching me how to drive his Tuk Tuk. Amazing. Its essentially like driving a moped but it feels alot more bumpy. Ace fun tho. I think I want to get one for bombing around town when I get home. Apparently they are only about $1000 US! Its funny when im practicing because all his Tuk Tuk driver mates just stare and laugh as the gringo does dodgy gear changes and nearly tips it over! Hopefully next week I will be able to master the 1st to 2nd gear change a bit better.

Also a slight change of plan on the volunteering front. Ive been helping out doing construction at a local school for the last couple of weeks. As of next week Im going to teach kids English in the centre of Trujillo. The hours are savage, with school starting at 7.30am, but it should be fun. They are age 10 to 14 so itll be interesting to get a taster of what my sister gets put through in her job!

Only other news is the surfing is progressing slowly. I dont want to say much more because last time I made a bold statement about my progress my surfing skills took a nose dive. Ive got a lesson tomorrow to try and accelerate my learning a bit. Hoping he can teach me to ride across the waves rather than just forwards.

It´s not always just chicas and cervezas

Sometimes I think that what I write on here sounds a bit overwhelmingly and unbelievably positive. In honesty it´s the truth. I took a year out before I went to university, and used to ask friends who had gone straight away how it was. They´d always give answers that were so overwhelmingly positive that I never believed them. My first year of uni was great, but I figure they were embelishing the greatness slightly. Well in a bid to verify my honesty, and also to have a good old fashioned rant I want to share with you the frustrations I´ve had these last 48 hours.

On Thursday I contracted the worst diarrea I´ve had to date. I´m sure I can have worse, but it was not fun. Partly because you end up getting ridiculously dehydrated so just get dizzy. I remember lieing in my bed wishing I could be slumped on the big couch I used to have in London, watching endless episodes of Frasier and Columbo (as much as I like the tortoises in my house, they´re no substitute for trusty Frasier and Columbo at times like this). Anyway, I popped a couple of super strength knock off imodium I bought in Bolivia and life started to get better. It still feels like a war is being waged between my weak English belly and the army of Peruvian food, but at least I´m not house bound.

Yesterday I went along to the local reggae night with my fellow volunteers. Gradually getting to know this lot. They range in ages from 18 (god 18 year olds seem so young nowadays!) to about 35 ish. About half are from Scandinavia, and the rest from Aus or England. We are speak in English which is obviously easy for me, but it still amazes me when you think about the fact that some of the Dutch girls from Holland can Speak Dutch, English (ridiculously fluently), German, and Spanish. All at the age of 19 ish. Sometimes I find it frustrating because you want to speak ridiculously fast and slangy with someone from England, but when it´s a conversation which involves someone with less English you have to calm down the pace and the slang so it´s inclusive. For me speaking languages is a bit like playing squash. It´s fun to play someone your own level or better, so in some ways it would be good if we all just spoke Spanish.

The reggae club was fun. It´s a live reggae band. Good clean fun. I think rant number three is coming now. Some of the guys living in my house were there with there mates which was good. I do like these guys, but they are hippies essentially. And as fun as hippies are to hang out with they are consistently scavenging. Always asking you for beer. Initially you think this is fine because you think it´s part of some world karma style round system, but after a while you start to realise they are just out for what they can get (on the beer front that is). There was one guy (who I should say I think isn´t their mate) just straight out wanted beer off me. No pre banter, nothing. I said no and the guy kept on saying “¿porque no?” aka “why not?”. I kept on saying “¿porque si?” aka “why yes?”. Anyway he got no beer from me. Hopefully I´m still in the world karma style round system, but I´m making a stand that I´m going to buy beers for people on the same basis that I do in blighty.

I don´t want to end on a low note. So some of the good things that happened last night. I was hanging out with Australian Deano early yesterday evening and we got chatting to a couple of chicas from Columbia and Venezuela. He´s just starting Spanish so I mainly did the chatting. It was a good banter, and all in Spanish! It´s satisfying to think that a few months ago I couldn´t even have asked them the time let alone chatted for an hour. So it´s nice to know all that time wrestling with Spanish grammer has been worthwhile. Learnt some new words too. “bacano” also means “chebere”  which means “cool”. Tickles me because sounds like bacon.

Thank you for your patience. The rant of this post is now over. I´m going to head out to surf for a bit now (hopefully the imodium is still working!), and then I have a Spanish class at 6.