Life in the Disaster Zone - Huarmey


Rise up Huarmey!
While we work hard here at All Hands, we do get to play hard here and there.

The town itself, though hardly a tourist destination even before the floods, is actually pretty charming in a way. It's a normal enough place - a thriving fishing town, an administrative centre for the province and a hub of local trade straddling the Panamerican highway. However, it is large enough to have secret places and discoveries, and a chance to immerse ourselves in a culture that is not at all oriented to the tourist dollar.

Huarmey from the hills

For starters, the people. They are an absolutely lovely bunch. These guys are still getting used to the presence of foreigners in their town, to the point that some people will openly stare at you in the street. Despite this, they are almost always super friendly to us. Of course, the fact that we are helping their town has a part to play in that, but you can tell the friendliness is genuine. It's little things: the excited, curious conversations with the ceviche lady about our home countries, the mountains of fruit that our beneficiaries often give to us while we are working, and even a bloke who gave me a ride on his motorbike while I was waiting for a tuktuk then gave me a free lunch when I turned up at his shop the next day.

And the food, oh my, the food. The local delicacy is Ceviche (seh-VEE-chay): fresh catch of the day served raw, pickled slightly in lime, served with red onion, chili, salad and roasted corn kernels for about $2. Despite the weirdness of the raw fish (Chilean Sea Bass) his is unbelieveably good, especially after a morning of work. Pretty much everything else is fish based, but there is also a lot of Guinea Pig served - I am yet to try one, but I am told that it tastes a lot like chicken. For a sweet treat, you can head to one of the bakeries for a pastry or one of the juice ladies for a big glass of liquified local produce - or get it in a bag for a takeaway!

Tuktuks are a big part of the city too. A tuktuk (or mototaxi as the locals call them) is a motorbike which has had the back wheel taken off and attached to two wheels and a bench, with a cage and a cover attached.

I did have a better photo but I can't find it. View from the back seats of a mototaxi


There are very few cars around as the mototaxi trade is so effective. You get a ride for 1 sol (about 40c) to anywhere in town and they are constantly in business all day, every day. Some of them are a bit cheeky and try to charge extra to us gringos, but most of them are fair with the fares.

The town is a little lacking in nightlife, but there are plenty of places to have a bev or two before our 10pm curfew. There are a few small bars which vary wildly from a cave with an old school jukebox to a decently fancy place which while pricey, does have free wifi to lure us in. Beyond them, there are a couple of pools halls which are normally fairly quiet until 30 of us invade the place and occupy half the tables. It's actually a frustrating experience - the pockets are much smaller than normal so games last for hours. Despite all this, our usual watering hole is the base dining room, supplied with beers from the nearby restaurants who are probably looking at holiday homes with all the extra revenue.

The beaches are really nice, and blend seamlessly into the desert beyond


On our days off, we have a couple of options: hit the beach, or head out of town for some fun. The beaches nearby are very pretty, with the ocean sand blending into the desert sand all the way up to the mountains and decent waves to bodysurf. In the afternoon sun, it's a great place for a tan and a book, or some more beers if you want. Heading out of town is a riskier prospect: fun is not always guaranteed, nor is a bus ride home on a Sunday evening, but if it works out it can be a great time. I will dedicate another post to my visit to Casma, a town full of ruins from before the Incas.

After a few weeks here, its difficult to tell someone about my experience in Huarmey. I mean, it's not a place to put on your itinerary. That said, it is a place that has touched my heart in a way very few places large or small have done on my travels. I have extended my stay twice since coming here, and the town and its people are a big part of why I did so. What can I say? Ceviche is hard to leave behind!

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