Here it is for real this time. All of these photos were taken by the kids of Fairmail. Check ‘em out, help ‘em out.

Yomira





Elmer





Betty





Jorge





MariaFlor





Juan Carlos





Patricia





Juli





For more info on Fairmail go to http://www.fairmail.info/

Check out all of my selections of their photos on my Flickr Page.

This is our last day in Huanchaco…for now. We are moving on and leaving some friends behind. We have spent a lot of time working with the Fairmail kids and developing our future media empire, so we didn’t get out much. However, our tans are darker and we have spent some quality time on the beach, but we haven’t forged any great bonds with other travelers or locals. I think this is a travelers mentality or just how it happens when you jump from town to town. I cherish the friends we have made in Huanchaco, and I hope we’ve made a big enough impact on them to insure that they will remember us when we return. Good by Huanchaco, we had a lot of fun and thank you for everything.

We’re a few days late on this, but it’s a sobering report nonetheless.

Dec. 8: Perfect Storm: Unless the nation of Peru takes immediate action, the ancient Andean glaciers could disappear by 2022–taking with them the runoff that provides 80 percent of the freshwater for the country

Read more at Barbara Drake’s blog, An American in Lima. I haven’t figured out how to embed the video–something she’s managed quite cleverly….

Big smile.

Perfection is what I desire, so when we stumbled across these, I knew I needed nothing more in life. The snow-cup, you might call it, comes with your choice of flavors: Strawberry (fresa), Mango, Tamerind, Guanábana, Mint, Piña, Limón (Lime). Forget about those High Fructose corn syrup mixed with some kind of chemical snow cones of your past, Dante’s has only fresh squeezed freshly pureed freshly sugared tasty goodness.



We met Dante for the first time near the beach when contemplating the ice cream in the ice cream shop across the street. I said, “Jessie, we should stop eating all of this ice cream, it is bad for our health.” So, we called on Dante and a Woman, who seemed to be running the show, to fulfill our needs. Dante did the scoopin’ and She did the pourin’. Jessie remembered seeing their cart being painted and fixed in the street near our appartment, and then so did I. They seemed busy, so I ordered a Fresa solo and Jessie experimented with a Mango and Coconut, telling ourselves that we must return and maybe write about it. Interesting.



Yesterday, I snuck out under the pretext of “Internet cafe/photo upload” and sampled their goods again, Fresa with Coco. And it was good.



Today we stopped by their permanent location across from the city Municipality. Dante was working solo, but there always seems to be a good group of people hanging out whenever we walk by. It quickly became obvious that Dante’s spot was the spot for locals and expats alike to re-fresh in a very fresh-fruit way. He told us his Mother has been doing this same thing for 40 Years. 40 Years, that is a lot to think about for a traveler. Back to the Solo Fresa for me and a Mango Coco for Jessie and just for fun a Limón (Lime) and Coconut for us (me.) They were great. And so is the sugar high.

Every culture has different tastes, be it a preference for salty, sweet, spicy…. (Or awful combinations, such as the Dutch candy Double Zout or that horrifying cayenne-tamarind stuff you find in Mexican candy aisles). A good barometer of these tastes is to try the Fanta that’s manufactured in the country you’re in. Peru’s is predictably sugar-filled.

Sometimes you can’t ever get used to the odd tastes of supposedly familiar foods (such as the freakishly magenta “ketchup” that Peruvians keep giving us), but sometimes they start to grow on you. Rob and I each compiled a list of things we never liked all that much, which we now find to be delicious.

Rob:

• Tea (black, with sugar). After months of getting it for breakfast, he’s actually become fond of it.
• Sweet bread. It’s sort of the only kind Peru has.
• Fish. When it’s so fresh and in every menu, it’s hard not to like it!
• Sugar! Alright, he already liked sweets. But here it’s in everything.

Jessie:

• Mayonnaise. In Peru it comes standard with a light lime flavor. Amazing!
• Soup. A standard first course in “menu” restaurants–add a squeeze of lime, and yum, yum, yum.
• Red onions. In Peru they marinate thin-sliced red onions in lime juice and serve them as a salad.
• Snowcones. No lime in these, but we found some made with real fresh fruit. Divine!

And now I’m hungry….

Today, class, we will be talking about Fairmail, with photos. I decided late last night to switch from a photo essay of the Fairmail kids photos to a photo essay of the fairmail kids. Enjoy.
Roberto.

Elmer with MariaFlor in the background from a Depth of Field lesson.

Juli up close.

The pack decends on Huanchaco.

Class starts and we look at photos that the kids took earlier in the week. This day it was on the beach.

Jessie and Yomira talk about camera stuff.

Camera straps have more than one purpose.

MariaFlor and Yomira after a surprise soaking.

Yomira.

Still on the beach.

MariaFlor explains it to me.

Over looking Huanchaco.

Patricia up close.

Patricia in the not-get-wet stance.

Yomira checking her photos.

Betty and Juli shooting down the beach working on telephoto shots.

Yomira taking photos in the Huanchaco cemetery.

Jessie posing for a wide-angle portrait lesson.

Flicker photo essay.

Flicker slide show.

Photographs page.

Here we are again with no power hence no internet. I will be posting a Photo Essay tomorrow that will contain photos that the kids at fairmail took. See you back here tomorrow.

I’d been dying to get on the neon green “Bs. Aires – Arevalo” bus whose sides are airbrushed with six-sided starbursts. The paint job made Buenos Aires, a little coastal community whose name we’d seen on maps and the sides of buses, look exotic and fun. I was intrigued.

We took our usual “Huanchaco” bus to the Ovalo Mansiche, a confusing knot of streets and overpasses. We knew that the Green buses passed through here, but we had no clue as to where, so we stood back and watched traffic for a while.

Trujillo’s bus system is a bit less complex than Lima’s, in that each company takes a single route, and all similarly-styled buses are going to the same place, but it still takes some doing to make sure you’re on the right bus.

After ten minutes of waiting for a Green bus, we gave up and caught a white-and-blue bus labeled Buenos Aires. As usual, we were the only gringos on the bus. The wrangler and driver glanced at each other when they let us off at the end of the line.

Buenos Aires has the feel of something that had been built to be much grander than it had turned out to be. The main road is a wide boulevard with palm trees and flower-bordered sidewalks, and on each blog sits an uninviting cement gazebo ,painted garish blue. The garden areas were well-taken care of, the grass carefully trimmed and shaped around the floral border.

The Malecón Colón (waterfront park) also looks as though it has seen better days. A rusting play area sits hopefully, the wood splintered and weatherworn. It’s hard to tell how old it might have been, since with the weather and the salt winds, things corrode so quickly here. The play area is a collection of forts and ladders and bridges that would never have been allowed to exist in the U.S. It looks hella fun.

There are a few bodyboarders in the waves, and a few just leaving, dripping wet trails behind them. A couple of families have come to picnic on the beach, which is a narrow strip of sand at the base of the 3-meter high sea wall. For about three blocks the walkway is still intact, stretching alongside sculpted garden areas with dry wading pools in front of empty restaurants.

The long malecón looks more defensive than recreational. To our left the sea wall ends and men with jackhammers are breaking up an eroded and collapsed section, whose foundation has been washed out from under it.

The smell of the ocean is strong here, the vegetable matter of the sea churned up by the waves, rotting dead things at the hide tide mark. I sit on the top of a stairway that leads down to the beach while Rob goes down to take photos; here it smells also of urine and abandoned trash. The cement steps are pitted and corroded, and there was once a railing, but the metal posts have been sawn off at the quick to form rusting pits in the cement, filled with sand. The base of the sea wall is piled high with small jagged boulders and pieces of blood-colored brick, discarded plastic bottles. The broken half-moon of a discarded cement culvert juts through the sand by Rob’s feet as he crouches to take a photo of the waves.

After a few moments the Seguridad Ciudadana comes by to warn us that it’s dangerous. The officer is a young man with smooth round features and a friendly face. He tells me that here there are people who would assault and rob us, and that although right now it’s not bad, that drug addicts come out at night. He gestures down the coast. “Over in Huanchaco it’s better. It’s calmer.” I thank him and assure him that we only plan to spend a little bit of time here, just a few more photos. He lets us know that they’ll be making the rounds and will keep an eye out for us. He shakes our hands and gets back in his pickup.

The Seguridad Ciudadana pickups are armored beasts, steel grilles welded over all the windows, even over the windshield (though you can flip it up if you need to drive). They drive a few blocks away, then stop. Rob and I are moving slowly even farther down the coast, taking photos.

Only one restaurant is open, and all the others seem abandoned. They are all the same varying shades of dirty white with colorful trim—green, blue and yellow, all the same cool tone, the same matte lack of luster.

Rob is taking a photo of a rusting swing set when the S.C. pickup’s reverse lights come on. I’m vaguely hopeful that they’ll insist on giving us a ride back into Trujillo, but that’s not the case. Pablo (he introduces himself now) is sitting on the passenger side. “Mira,” he says. “Are you planning to walk farther down, or just about to here?”

At the end of this block the malecón ends in a dirt road strewn with rubble and trash. The sea wall continues as a crumbling barrier. It looks like a war zone.

“Just to here,” I say. “Just a few more photos.”

Pablo nods. “You can tell it’s dangerous there, can’t you?”

I agree. They roll along beside us as we walk back the way we came. Pablo asks how long we’re in Peru. Six weeks in Trujilo volunteering, I say. I tell him that we have an apartment in Huanchaco, and he looks satisfied. “Huanchaco es mas tranquilo,” he says again.

I ask him the history of the area. He tells me that there were once pre-inca temples here, and one of Peru’s oldest churches was built here. “In taxi you can get there in four minutes.” He gives me a look. “Si, en taxi van,” he repeats.

I tell him that we expected this to be a rich part of town, and he looks incredulous. I tell him that in the U.S. if there was beachfront property this close to a city it would be quite expensive.

He shrugs. “There are really great people here, really friendly. But also there are the bad ones who would assault and rob you.” He gestures to Rob’s camera. “You need to be careful with your equipment.” Rob nods, sí, sí, sí. It’s a daily warning for us.

Finally we convince them that we’re about to leave and they make their way down the road, waving goodbye. We continue walking slowly, past the dry dolphin wading pool, past the old man and woman sitting beneath the sea-creature print umbrella selling papas rellenas and empanadas from a rusty orange cart.

We catch my Green “Bs. Aires – Arevalo” bus, and it takes us back to the gringo “Huanchaco” line. We’re back where we belong.

Check out Robert’s Flickr page of our visit to Buenos Aires.

Three months in Peru, already?

For those of you who are new to the blog, who were snoozing, or merely just can’t get enough of what the Kittilson-Kwak team is up to (have you been wondering what KnK Explore meant?), we put together a little retrospective on the month of November.

HUANCHACO



This has been a good month full of catching up and thinking ahead, and saving money. Summer’s been heating up in Huanchaco, and it seems like every day there are more and more tourists in the street—both Peruvian and foreign. On sunny weekends, especially, the beaches fill up—I wrote about the contrast between the weekends and the weekdays, but really at any time you can find people walking the beach.

We’ve been diving into our new home a bit more, visiting the local sights such as the temple of Arco Iris or the Casonas Antiguas of Trujillo, talking with one of Huanchaco’s oldest families, and just sittin’ around the front porch.

FAIRMAIL



Volunteering has been going well. I haven’t written much about it because we’ve still been getting into the groove of things, but the problem with volunteering for such a short amount of time is that once you get in the groove you’ve got to move along.

Fairmail has eight students right now, five girls and three boys. Some are more advanced than others, and it’s been a challenge to find a teaching style that works for such a group. Mostly we’ve just been dealing with each kid individually, downloading their homework photos and discussing them with the kid, then sending them out to take more.

We’re both learning more Spanish by the day—useful phrases like “tiempo de obturadora” (shutter speed).

We’ll be putting together a photo essay from the kids soon so you can see who we’re dealing with here.

Speaking of….

PHOTO ESSAYS



Rob’s been busy at work since we introduced Peru With Three Lenses, our Sunday photo essay feature. In case you missed any, here they are:

• Huanchaco
• Trujillo
• Lima
• Market Time

MIDWEEK SNACK

We also launched the Midweek Snack this month, which has forced us to go out and eat a lot of delicious food for the sake of documentation. We’ve explained how the Peruvian “set menu” works, then how to make cancha. We’ve also paid visits to a couple of our favorite Huanchaco restaurants, including Generous Sandwich and El Anzuel.

THE FUTURE

We’re looking toward the future here, at creating a site aimed toward providing information to travelers of the type that we are—folks getting off the beaten path, looking for information on places that aren’t listed in guidebooks or for whom the information is scarce.

The idea is still fermenting in our heads, but we’ll let you know more when we have a better grasp. But for now look for a new and improved KnK Explore in January. It’ll still have the writing and photos you know and love, but with better organization and more deliberately useful articles and information.

Our plan is to fly home in March in order to make some more money, then return to Peru sometime around November 2010 to continue gathering information about travel, and to see everything we haven’t gotten to yet!