2/11/2009 22:30
Now my last week of Spanish has finished and I am on my way on my travels out to see Peru. I'm writing this post from the bus to Trujillo Up the coast of Peru I'm just starting on a 9½ hour bus ride to the North along the Pan-American Highway, which runs all the way along the coast of the Pacific. It's a night bus ride but I still hope to get a reasonable sleep since I have booked a 1st class seat on Peru's top quality (and safest) bus company and quite frankly I have never had a bus seat this nice. Tomorrow I will head out to the beach side suburb of Trujillo where I will relax a bit and maybe do some surfing.
The last week has been filled with a lot of planning of my jungle trip I'm going on with Lara in December and with shopping all the items I needed from Lima before heading out. I could also feel that I was getting a bit tired of the Spanish lessons this week. In the end it was difficult to keep track of the grammar because In the 5 weeks I have learned 7 different tenses and since I did not have time to really learn any of them, the uses of the different tenses and the conjugation of their regular and irregular verbs became one big confusion. It was also getting difficult to keep up with the level as my class mate was a Harvard student who had had 3 years of Spanish in high school and one year in college.
The main event of this was however the dolphin watching trip I went on yesterday. It was quite an expensive trip, but it was worth it. It was one of the most spectacular nature experiences I have ever been on. 5 hours of racing across the waves in a zodiac along a fantastic coastline of desert, majestic cliffs and deserted beaches, while the sun shone from a sky of pure blue. We saw many birds, including pelican penguins and many other species whose names I cannot remember, but some of which were very beautiful and some were also very rare. E.g. we saw one Peruvian bird of which there are only about 10.000 left and which only breeds on two islands, but of which there used to be many millions and which can dive to depth of up to 70 m.
The trips main highlight was the dolphins of which we saw many small herds of up to about 8 individuals. We saw them jump in the waves and they came and up to 4 of them at a time would ride the bow wave of our boat. It was amazing to see them come up and blow and jump though the waves less than 2 m from us.
After the dolphins we went to have lunch next to one of the guano islands which was covered with a huge bird colony, however, the biologist who was guiding us said the present colony only was only about 4% of the size of the colony which had been there before commercial sardine fishing started in the fifties. In the old days the island had been covered with a guano layer of 50 m, but that had been mined away to be used as fertilizers and the original population of 44 million guano producing birds had now been reduced to about 1.5 million due to sardine fishing. However the bird colony we saw was still impressive.
Then we went to a colony of wild sea lions and I got in a wet suit to have a swim with them. The three others on the tour were all too worried about the cold water to come, but it was not that cold and you could get really close to the colony when swimming. The sea lions did not come very close to me as the sometimes do, but I did see some of the swimming around about 3 m beneath me. They are so agile in the water. It was really an amazing sight. I also found that when I started jumping up and down in the water they would look at me and start nodding their heads in response. Sometimes they would then get in the water and swim beneath me. It was really fun to be able to get this contact with a wild animal.
After the sea lions we sailed back to the habour by a faster route further from the coast. Here were the chance of seeing grey dolphins and whales but we were not lucky enough to see them. Altogether it was a really great trip, however, and I did take loads of pictures. I used up both sets of batteries I had for my digital camera and altogether got more than 2.5 Gb of pictures and movies just from today, so I think it is good that I have a computer here to download pictures from the camera.
After the trip we drove back to Lima but we were all really exhausted Lara and I went out and got a great sushi dinner. I guess I was a bit hasty when I wrote that ceviche was better than sushi. I guess I should have written better than Danish sushi because the sushi we got here was just fantastic.