In the event, the tsunami ended up being more of a trickle once it hit Peru. Thank God.
I spent a second night in Piura keeping tabs on CNN, and flicking over to the local news channel to watch the Peruvian minister of waterways (or whatever he was) point a big stick at a big map:
I was counting down the hours until I knew it was safe to venture to the coast and Piura - pleasant enough as it was - was not a place you wanted to spend too long in. Waking in the morning, I saw that all tsunami alerts for all countries down the South American coast had been cancelled. I packed my bag and went to get a bus to Mancora.
It's severely hot out here at the moment. The sort of heat that makes you walk at about half-a-mile per hour, makes you drink two litres of water before 8am, makes you want to dip in the swimming pool whenever possible, and makes your skin burn if you're a fool. Like me.
After a sweaty bus journey through the desert (the sweat compounded by a large, surly man taking up half of my seat), I reached Mancora. I'd booked into the Kokopelli hostel, a relatively new place that had been given good reviews on HostelWorld.
It is just what you need a hostel to be: laid-back, welcoming, clean, well-located, with a fully stocked bar, a bunch of fellow travellers and a swimming pool like this:
Result.
Mancora itself is a smallish town spread out along a couple of kilometres of sandy beach. There's one main drag with the usual traveller-friendly selection of restaurants, tour operators, hostels and shops (all of which sell T-shirts. All of which say MANCORA in massive letters on them. I need a T-shirt but don't fancy being a walking advert for a small Peruvian beach town, so I'll wait).
As soon as I arrived, I got chatting to people in the bar/pool area. We hit the beach...
...and the one patch of my back that my arms couldn't physically reach round and apply suncream to, got burned. Since then, because of the sheer heat of the sun and the Burn Fear Factor, I've mainly stayed in the shade until the cooler evenings come around.
But it's a great hostel to be at if you want to just sit in the shade, chat, play chess, read.
And we did venture out on Saturday night, to a party we'd heard about further down the coast. After a moonlit walk along the beach we heard repetitive beats and stepped into the large palm-fringed back garden of the Mancora Bay hotel.
They'd done the place up really well: white sheeting and gazebos had laser beams bouncing off them, and the torquoise pool looked really inviting.
It was a strange party as the place didn't really start to fill up until 2am, by which time we were almost out on our feet. Saying that, we still managed a bit of time on the dancefloor. Or, to be more exact, the dancegrass:
What else?
The food. It's good here. An amazing beef steak on night one (bigger than my fist) and an amazing tuna steak on night two (chunkier than Oddjob).
I also had a Menu of the Day at a recommended vegetarian restaurant yesterday lunchtime. For about three quid you got tasty falafels to start, followed by a salad that could feed a small family. For a week.
It came with a 'red corn juice', whatever that is, and was one of the best meals I've had in a while.
Now I know this all sounds rather mundane, and probably a bit too detailed for a travel blog, but as my days are spent doing very little I have to record something. You can't be cycling down volcanoes every day, after all.
Next post: the vagaries of crossing the road in Mancora, followed by a ten-point description of the pool's sunloungers.
You can't buy this sort of travel writing.
I spent a second night in Piura keeping tabs on CNN, and flicking over to the local news channel to watch the Peruvian minister of waterways (or whatever he was) point a big stick at a big map:
I was counting down the hours until I knew it was safe to venture to the coast and Piura - pleasant enough as it was - was not a place you wanted to spend too long in. Waking in the morning, I saw that all tsunami alerts for all countries down the South American coast had been cancelled. I packed my bag and went to get a bus to Mancora.
It's severely hot out here at the moment. The sort of heat that makes you walk at about half-a-mile per hour, makes you drink two litres of water before 8am, makes you want to dip in the swimming pool whenever possible, and makes your skin burn if you're a fool. Like me.
After a sweaty bus journey through the desert (the sweat compounded by a large, surly man taking up half of my seat), I reached Mancora. I'd booked into the Kokopelli hostel, a relatively new place that had been given good reviews on HostelWorld.
It is just what you need a hostel to be: laid-back, welcoming, clean, well-located, with a fully stocked bar, a bunch of fellow travellers and a swimming pool like this:
Result.
Mancora itself is a smallish town spread out along a couple of kilometres of sandy beach. There's one main drag with the usual traveller-friendly selection of restaurants, tour operators, hostels and shops (all of which sell T-shirts. All of which say MANCORA in massive letters on them. I need a T-shirt but don't fancy being a walking advert for a small Peruvian beach town, so I'll wait).
As soon as I arrived, I got chatting to people in the bar/pool area. We hit the beach...
...and the one patch of my back that my arms couldn't physically reach round and apply suncream to, got burned. Since then, because of the sheer heat of the sun and the Burn Fear Factor, I've mainly stayed in the shade until the cooler evenings come around.
But it's a great hostel to be at if you want to just sit in the shade, chat, play chess, read.
And we did venture out on Saturday night, to a party we'd heard about further down the coast. After a moonlit walk along the beach we heard repetitive beats and stepped into the large palm-fringed back garden of the Mancora Bay hotel.
They'd done the place up really well: white sheeting and gazebos had laser beams bouncing off them, and the torquoise pool looked really inviting.
It was a strange party as the place didn't really start to fill up until 2am, by which time we were almost out on our feet. Saying that, we still managed a bit of time on the dancefloor. Or, to be more exact, the dancegrass:
What else?
The food. It's good here. An amazing beef steak on night one (bigger than my fist) and an amazing tuna steak on night two (chunkier than Oddjob).
I also had a Menu of the Day at a recommended vegetarian restaurant yesterday lunchtime. For about three quid you got tasty falafels to start, followed by a salad that could feed a small family. For a week.
It came with a 'red corn juice', whatever that is, and was one of the best meals I've had in a while.
Now I know this all sounds rather mundane, and probably a bit too detailed for a travel blog, but as my days are spent doing very little I have to record something. You can't be cycling down volcanoes every day, after all.
Next post: the vagaries of crossing the road in Mancora, followed by a ten-point description of the pool's sunloungers.
You can't buy this sort of travel writing.