Surfing the Andes

I’m a little behind. I’m actually in northern Peru with Condesa, but I’ve been away from Internet for a few weeks so we’ll backtrack a bit.

My friend Tony flew down from California to take a surf trip on Condesa, but everyone cautioned us against the dangers of an exploration of northern Peru by sea. In the end we rented the Pride of Callao, a Nissan Sentra, and put almost 2000 km on it.

The northernmost point of our trip was the legendary Chicama, supposedly the longest wave in the world. We caught it great for two days, with our hotel room’s balcony overlooking the break. Even when we weren’t surfing it, we were always watching it…mesmerizing.



Peru is a dry and desolate country west of the Andes. Most of what we drove through was sand dunes, like where you could just wander off and die of thirst. Occasionally the desert was puncuated with Israeli-style agricultural projects, where they were turning the desert into green. My favorite visual part of the trip was the northern Peru Conduit Project. I liked to think it was some mad artist, like Cristo, who had strung this stuff for hundreds of kilometers, but I think they’re going to run fiber optic cables.



Tony sprained his toe and we were aching for a change of scenery, so we decided to head up into the Andes to Huaraz. The map didn’t show that this involved crossing a 14,400 foot pass, higher than the highest point in the continental US. Of course we did this in the middle of the night. The damage to the Pride of Lima was less than $100, which is amazing since we bottomed her out over 200 times and high-centered her twice.

The original photograph is unavailable. Explore the recovered photo archive.