El Blog: Terremoto Tour / Why Peru is not Known for its Wine

This blog entry is brought to you by Lisa Devine

After watching Uruguay get knocked out of the world cup on Tuesday, or even more dramatic, watching a player get bicycle kicked in the face, we jumped on a bus from Lima headed 4 hours south to Pisco, home of Peruvian wine and pisco, a local brandy. Looking out the bus window, I have to say, I've never seen such a large expanse of what can only be described as a shithole!

Outside of Lima are barren rocky hills covered in slums and beyond that, for hours, is just desolate dry fields with piles of rubble and trash. We held out hope that Pisco would be a cute town with lots of nearby vineyards, but it turns out that our 2007 guidebook was published before the area was hit by an 8.5 terremoto (earthquake) which killed hundreds of people, demolished tons of buildings, including the cathedral in the center of town, and ruined water and sewage lines. The government hadn't done much to fix the place back up, and so Pisco, like the stretch of landscape before it, is, well, a shithole. Apparently there had been aid money, but the higher ups pocketed it and very little trickled down to the people.

In order to make our contribution to the local economy, we took a bus and boat tour, passing what can only be described as a nuclear test site (Chris' description), to a little sea side village where we hopped on boats to "the poor man's Gallapagos" to see thousands of birds, penguins, sea lions, and tons and tons of nutrient rich guano (bird poo). The boat tour was very cool and was followed by a tour of a nearby national park that looks like the face of the moon but actually used to be the ocean floor something like 45 million years ago. We ate good seafood there and watched the first half, or the boring half, of the Spain vs. Germany game while sipping a pisco sour.

After Pisco, we continued our earthquake zone tour further south to Ica and Huancachina where we toured wineries and pisco distilleries and hiked up some incredible sand dunes to watch the sunset with a bottle of Peruvian wine. Wine in Peru is sweet and frankly not very impressive, but the pisco sours, kinda like margaritas, are kick ass. Working our way back to Lima, we stopped for a night in Lunahuana to do some mountain bikng and more wine and pisco tasting. We continued to not be impressed by the wine or the post-earthquake reconstruction efforts.

In conclusion, here are some words of wisdom from our "gallapagos islands" bird guide:

"Always watch out for the shits from above."