Look Out for the Black Foot

LAN finally decided to give my boards and I made the quick decision to get the hell out of Lima. It only took me a 10 hour bus ride to get there. Unfortunately, I had the man with the unstraightenable arms and so he was giving me the forearm shiver for the whole ride. Plus you have the driver who couldn´t stop honking the whole night. I think that honking is placed on the Peruvian drivers test.

Sample question:

You are driving along the highway and you need to make a lane change, but there is a car right next to you. What do you do?

A) Put your turn signal on and wait paciently until the driver is out of the way.
B) Speed up and cut the asshole off
C) Honk loudly and spin the wheel

I know the Californian answer would be (B) but here it´s (C). I´ve never seen so many lane changes with another person occupying the space in the lane. Needless to say, with this style of driving I did not get much sleep.

And once I was in Pacasmayo the fun didn´t stop. I saw that the surf was pumping so I tore into my wettie and ran out the gate. I got a taxi out to the point (I´m being very lenient with the word taxi, more like a three wheeled moped with a parasol on top) because it´s quite a hike to get out to the point and it´s all over rocks.

I had almost made it and I was watching the surf when all of a sudden the ´taxi´ hit a soft spot in the sand and capsized. Luckily for the ´taxi´ my foot broke the fall. Unfortunately for me it left me with a pretty good sized bruise along the top of my foot. It was also sore.

I did still surf though and found Pacasmayo to be a really fun wave and extraordinarily long.

But that´s not why I´m here.

About an hour south of Pacasmayo lays the little port city of Puerto Malabrigo and on the southern end of the bay is the longest wave in the world (not counting tidal bores). On top of being thigh-burningly long (okay I know it´s not a word but Dr. Seuss made up weirder words) it is as close to perfect as any wave I have ever seen. I happened to arrive on the eve of the swell and today was one of the most fun days I´ve ever had. Just long uncrowded lefts that were peeling all the way through the bay. It was one of the coolest things I´ve ever seen. I think I might try to wait it out and surf it one more time before I leave. It´s definitely worth it.