Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Lobitos - Northern Peru


, originally uploaded by m_hagen.

Our first morning dawned crisp and clean, groomed by the predominate offshore winds found here. Unreal to wake up and see Ranch surface conditions with half a dozen sand points within walking distance of Darwin´s place. Darrin and I jogged down the beach to La Piscina where we surfed picture perfect head-high lefts with a most polite crowd of 5 others. Everyone taking turns. After one wave Darrin paddled back out laughing, telling me how he´s never surfed a spot where complete strangers called him into waves straight away. Of course not every story has a perfect ending. You should be warned that this place does need a solid swell to get around the corner and when the swell does come up, the local boogie crew can be pretty aggressive. That said it´s still a sweet spot worth coming back to.

Upon arrival, the fishing village of Lobitos looks like a ghost town. The U.S. built a military installation here 50-60 years ago to guard the oil one of our giant Texas corps was here to raid. Some thing´s just never change... Eventually the Peruvian Government decided to reclaim the oil reserves off their coast and booted the U.S. out. Since then the town has fallen into a decrepit mess. The place has a ghost town charm to it with the rusted hulking pier, the abandoned houses and church. Some of the homes look earily like our bungalow back in California. The demolition goes on daily bit by bit, piece by piece. Retired fishermen gather scraps of iron to ride into Talara with for pennies. We found it an interesting place, so we stayed a couple of weeks....

1 comment:

Zabeth said...

hey mike the surf looks unreal, sounds like a really fun stop for your trip, clean uncrowded perfect waves. what everyone else is only dreaming of,,ohhhhhhh how lucky !!!!!!!!!! all the best, josh