South America is probably one of my favorite places to visit, the water is warm and there are some uncrowded gems. On my most recent visit I was in Machala, Ecuador supporting my girlfriend in the Miss Ecuador Pageant. As I was researching some bus routes to the ocean I realized Peru was only a few hours to a hotspot of lefts. Namely Lobitos, although desolate it is home to an array of barreling wedgy lefts.
We mistakenly hopped in a moto to the beach from where the bus dropped us. This was a 1 and half hour journey across a desert, not the best place for a moto taxi! I literally had to help the driver push us through some soft sand during the trip (gotta love it).
We finally arrive to realize I was being dropped off at the "Surf Point" hostel, not surf spot (would have been too good to be true if it was labeled that). We were quite hungry from the trip so we ventured into a local restaurant where a local surfer happened to be serving us. He told me exactly where to go, "Piscinas", this place was magical. Literally a natural pool that overlooked this amazing left, I have never seen anything like that. Only thing that sucked was we had to walk 2 miles across the beach, as we were followed by vultures waiting for us to drop from heat exhaustion.
I heard rumors of a place where the longest left in the world broke, it was called Chicama. I looked up various bus routes, and it was about 15 hours from Mancora. We grabbed a bus that left at 10PM, figuring it would be smart to drive through the night. Of course you'd want to grab dinner before this journey, so we went to what seemed to be a high end Sushi restaurant in Mancora. I got the octopus which was being caught in the rocks in front of our hotel, big mistake! An hour later we entered the bus and I felt like I was going to DIE! I was sweating, nauseous, and unable to rest my eyes. This was by far the longest road journey I ever had to endure, and to make matters worse is that we had to make a bus transfer at a large city for another 3 hour drive. It was well worth the trip, we arrived to Chicama to see waves peeling beyond the eyes can conceive. The average ride was about 1.5 minutes, and my longest ride that day was over 2 min and 30 seconds! This was the only wave in the world I have ever surfed that my legs were on FIRE, after the twelfth cutback I was in awe that a wave like this can actually exist.
Peru was probably one of my favorite places to ever visit, not because of the landscape (barren desert). But because there was some really amazing left waves that were never crowded.