Peru’s Best Beach Town: Mancora

by Jessica Festa on

After hiking the Inca Trail outside Cuzco and exploring the museums in the bustling city of Lima, many travelers agree they crave nothing more than a relaxing setting and a beautiful beach. If you’re making your way north, a worthwhile stop is Mancora, thought by many locals and tourists to feature Peru‘s best beaches.

Getting There

If you’d like to make the journey in style and comfort, my recommendation is to take the Cruz del Sur bus company. Backpacking six countries in South America, I definitely had my fair share of questionable bus rides; however, Cruz del Sur was the best company I traveled with on the entire continent. Not only do they check bags and do body scans for safety reasons, they feed you a delicious hot meal, show movies in English or Spanish with subtitles, have comfortable reclining seats and provide you with a pillow and blanket. And, the bathrooms were clean and stocked with toilet paper and soap, something almost unheard of on bus transportation in South America.

If flying, the closest airports are in Piura, Tumbes or Talara. When flying internationally, you’ll need to travel to Lima first, and then take a national flight to one of the three cities.

Food

Luckily, there are many typical Peruvian restaurants in town. This means you’ll be able to easily find and enjoy local, affordable eateries. The most I ever paid for a meal in Mancora was 5 nuevo soles (about $1.80) on a set menu, which includes a starter, entree and refreshing glass of juice. A usual lunch would be a large bowl of chicken noodle soup followed by either baked chicken with rice and potatoes or goat or beef with rice, salad and beans.

Mancora is also a great place to sample some fresh ceviche, or cebiche, as you’ll see it written on restaurant signs.

To Do

When in Mancora, the best thing you can do is absolutely nothing. The town is very different from many of the popular tourist spots in Peru, and has an amazingly laid-back vibe and stress-free atmosphere. Walking down the main street, you’ll see people browsing beach-inspired markets, locals relaxing with a newspaper, playing cards or enjoying a delicious meal, and travelers with dreadlocks and baggy pants twisting each others’ hair and weaving bracelets in the sun. At the hostel I stayed at, many of the staff were backpackers who had simply fallen in love with the lifestyle of the area and didn’t want to leave.

Still, there are things to do if you so please. Most importantly, spend time on the beach. Here you’ll not only be able to sunbathe and go swimming, you’ll also be able to partake in a range of water sports and adventure activities, like surfing, windsurfing, kayaking, kitesurfing and horseback riding. I’d also recommend watching the sunrise or sunset at least once while you’re there, as the beach is such a peaceful place to watch the colorful show of nature.

If you’re in town during August, September or October, it’s definitely worth it to book a whale watching tour. During that time, humpback whales swim from Antarctic waters to breed during reproduction season. Participants have an 80 percent chance of seeing the whales diving, breaching, swimming and playing.

In Mancora, there are also many places to partake in yoga. You’ll pay about S/.20 for 90 minutes, and will feel invigorated for the rest of the day. To find a center, just walk along the beach near the hotels and you’ll find signs advertising the service. I recommend checking out Samana Chakra and Mancora Yoga: A Center for Radiant Living.

To help you relax even further, getting a massage is an option in this chill beach village. The most reputable spa in the area is Origenes Spa, which offers holistic and specialized treatments – like cooling cucumber for sunburn if you’re like me and forget how strong the sun is in Mancora. Depending on what you get will depend on the price, but some examples include a 60-minute aromatherapy massage (about $58), a honey and cucumber facial (about $52) a 2-hour fertility ritual (about $112) and a 30-minute floral bath (about $52). To see the complete menu, click here.

There is also a woman named Sarah Lane who was recommended by my hostel, who gives massages on the beach from 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. You can find her near the Quebrada entrance of the beach – email her at sarahlanetherapies@gmail.com or visit her website.

Day Trips

Located about an hour out of town is Cabo Blanco. Here, you’ll find the charming fishing village where Ernest Hemingway used to hangout and drink Pisco Sours while writing brilliant text like “Old Man and the Sea.” The location is also where the author caught a 700-pound Marlin fish. If you’d like an informational tour, Pacific Adventures offers a “Hemingway Route” trip that visits all the spots that inspired this legendary writer. For surfers, Cabo Blanco is also known as one of the best places in Peru for the sport.

Another day trip option is to travel about 30 minutes northeast to Poza de Barro, where you’ll find a natural hot spring and mud bath. Not only is it relaxing, a soak in the bubbling, sulfurous water is said to be good for your health, curing skin ailments, mineral deficiencies, rheumatic conditions, stress and eliminating toxins. The trip costs about S/. 35 (about $13) round trip.

Nightlife

Most of the nightlife scene revolves around the hotels and hostels. Loki Mancora is the most notorious party spot in the city, and visitors should get there before 10:00 p.m. or risk being charged an admission fee. The Point Mancora Beach also puts on regular theme parties, including their monthly Full Moon Party, which features a live DJ spinning near the pool (shown right). After 2:00 a.m., head to Cocos Beach Club or Charlie Brown’s in town to finish the night.

[Image via Surfglassy/Flickr]

The Last Pyramids Of Egypt

by Sean McLachlan on


They just don’t make pyramids like they used to.

The pyramids of Egypt have fascinated people ever since they were built. The Step Pyramid at Saqqara started things off around 2650 B.C. Later came the iconic pyramids of Giza. What’s often forgotten, however, is that pyramid construction continued for more than a thousand years and there are at least 138 built to house the remains of pharaohs and queens. More are still being discovered. Last year, satellite imagery revealed seventeen previously unknown pyramids.

The later pyramids of Egypt tend to be overlooked, and it’s easy to see why considering the sad state of most of them. Just take a look at this photo of the pyramid of Senusret II (ruled 1895-1878 B.C.) and photographed by Jon Bodsworth. Like a lot of later pyramids, it was made of mud bricks instead of stone blocks to save money, and that’s why it’s a giant sad lump today – an interesting lump, though.

The interior tunnels are still intact and archaeologists discovered the nearby village where the workmen lived. Contrary to popular belief, slaves didn’t construct the pyramids. Actually, it was trained craftsmen and farmers who didn’t have any other work to do when their fields were underwater during the annual flooding of the Nile.

Senusret II was part of the 12th Dynasty, a high point in Egyptian power and civilization. It’s strange then that pyramids were in decline. You can see several of these pyramids at Dahsur, not far from Saqqara and an easy day trip from Cairo. One is the Black Pyramid of Amenemhat III (ruled 1842-1797 B.C.). It started to collapse almost immediately so he had to build a second one at the Faiyum Oasis near a giant temple to the crocodile god Sobek. This site reopened last year.

%Gallery-155699%The experimentation with cheaper building methods may have started with Senusret I (ruled 1962-1928 B.C.). Instead of a solid geometric shape, the builders first constructed a network of walls crisscrossing each other and dividing the pyramid into 32 parts. These were then filled with loose stone. A smooth limestone facing was put over the whole thing. It sounded good in theory, but it’s another sad lump today.

Perhaps as a compensation for the cheap building styles, the later pyramids had elaborate tricks to stop tomb robbers: dead end tunnels sealed with thick stones; interior chambers made of quartzite, the hardest substance worked in Ancient Egypt; elaborately sealed rooms that contained nothing; and sarcophagi as big as the rooms that held them in order to deny robbers room to work.

Sadly, none of these tricks worked and the pharaohs eventually resorted to hidden underground tombs in places like the Valley of the Kings. After the 12th and 13th dynasties, pyramids went out of fashion. Many of the 13th dynasty rulers didn’t bother building one at all. Only a few were made by later dynasties. The last pyramid made for a pharaoh was for Ahmose I around 1525 B.C. It’s a pile of rubble now that barely measures 30 feet high. Much later, pyramids briefly became fashionable in the Sudan.

The pyramid was dead, and last year, so was Egypt’s tourism industry. It’s been gradually rebuilding itself, though. Cruise lines are returning, as are independent travelers. The tourist sights remained mostly unaffected by the unrest and there’s not much trouble outside of a few spots in Cairo.

Visitors will have more to see with six tombs at Giza having reopened and Egyptologists hard at work uncovering more ancient wonders. Many of the later pyramids haven’t been excavated and while all the ones that have been explored were plundered by tomb robbers centuries ago, there’s always a chance that the treasure of a pharaoh remains hidden inside one of them.

Encountering Monet At The Musee d’Orsay

by Don George on

Reading Gadling’s marvelous Museum Month posts has reminded me of a trip I made two decades ago to Paris. I had fallen in love with that exhilarating city in the mid-1970s, when I lived there for two successive summers, first after my junior year in college and then after graduation. I returned in 1988 to celebrate the city, and as part of that celebration, I wanted to write an essay about the poignancy and power of the artworks I had discovered at the Louvre, the Musee Rodin, the Musee de Cluny, the Petit Palais, the Musee d’Orsay, and many other museums and galleries.

First I thought I would write about all the showplaces for art that I liked in Paris, but I quickly realized that I couldn’t possibly do justice to so many places in a compact piece. I had to focus. I considered describing my favorite three museums, then just one museum, then three rooms in that museum, then three favorite pieces of art there. But though I narrowed my focus more and more, every one of these subjects still seemed too broad.

Finally I decided to focus on one painting in one museum, my favorite painting in all of Paris. I installed myself near that painting for about an hour, and scribbled in my journal. I have that journal before me now. Here’s what I wrote.I have been looking at Monet’s “Les coquelicots,” the painting of two women and children walking through a field of bright red poppies on a sunny, cloud-dappled day, for about 40 minutes. It moves me just as profoundly now as it did when I was last in Paris 12 years ago; it still tugs deep within me, cuts through all the layers to something fresh and fundamental and childlike.

At first I stared at it closely, my nose within a foot of the canvas, so close that I could see the black-dot eyes of the child in the foreground – something I had never seen before, or at least never remembered seeing.

Get that close and you reduce the painting to its elements: layers of oil paint on canvas, brush strokes, dabs, tiny tip-tips with the brush. You realize just how fragile a thing a painting is, and just how common. And you realize too that it was made by a man – fragile, common – who stood at the canvas and thought: “a little more red here,” dab, dab; “a cloud there,” push, push; “how can I capture that light?”

Look at the painting closely this way for a few minutes and you break it down into an intricate complexity of colors and textures and forms.

Then step back and – voila! – all of a sudden it is a composed whole, a painting: a cloud-bright sky and poppy-bright field, a woman with a fancy hat and a parasol and a child almost hidden by the tall grasses in the foreground, and in the background another woman and a child almost obscured against a distant stand of trees. They are on a walk, or a picnic – a story begins to compose itself, to take on a life inside and outside the canvas.

And you realize that this is a kind of miracle, that colors and shapes dabbed on a piece of cloth 115 years ago have somehow reached across time and culture to touch you.

Look long enough and feel deeply enough, and your eyes fill with tears.

And when you feel these wet, cool, unexpected tears, you look around you suddenly as if waking from a dream, and see men and women in shorts, blue jeans, dresses and sportcoats, holding guidebooks and pointing at the canvas and sighing, or whispering in passionate appreciation.

You feel strangely displaced – for a moment it was your painting, or rather, you were a part of it, and now you are outside it again – but then you think, “This too is part of the miracle, that one painting can touch so many people.”

You think of art’s extraordinary power, that a scattering of people and poppies in a field can push age, despair, fatigue and cynicism away, can focus you so intensely on this time, this place; that time, that place.
You stand close to the canvas again and see the complexity of colors – the fields all gray, brown, green, yellow-green; the poppies red and pink; the sky a mixture of light and dark blues; the clouds gray, purple, white.

You see that the forms are simple: a gently rolling landscape; smoothly, sparingly suggested people. And that the child in the foreground holds flowers that are almost the same color as the band in his (her?) hat.
You step back one last time and see peace, lightness, a sense of infinite wonder and potential, a childlike purity.

And when you return to the luminous streets you know you will hold that vision in your head, like a handful of flowers on a country-bright day.

You know that you have returned to Paris. You know that, deep inside, you were never away.

[flickr image via biscarotte]

Gadling Gear Review: SuperTooth Disco Portal Speaker

by Kraig Becker on

One of the best things about carrying smartphones, tablets and laptops with us when we travel, is that we are also generally carrying our entire music libraries with us as well. The problem is, the speakers on those devices aren’t usually the best for enjoying that music and we don’t always want to wear headphones to get the best sound. Fortunately a number of companies now make excellent portable speaker systems that do offer great sound and are fun to take with us on the road.

One of those speaker systems is the Disco from SuperTooth, which can stream music from any device that supports Bluetooth 2.0 technology. Once paired with such a device, the Disco pumps out surprisingly loud and clear music, streaming audio, movie soundtracks or anything else that you can throw at it. I was impressed with how this relatively small device could fill a room with sound, serving up distinct highs and lows and clear vocals from a variety of sources.

While the Disco does included a standard wired audio port for devices that don’t use Bluetooth, the best way to connect is wirelessly of course. Pairing my iPhone and iPad with the Disco was simple and took just seconds and once they were connected, it was a breeze to stream my personal music library, as well as audio from Pandora, Stitcher Radio or any other app. It was a joy to listen to podcasts while wandering around my apartment and it was fun to use the speaker system as a mini-home theater while watching movies on my iPad too.All of that great sound comes courtesy of two 8-watt speakers and a 12-watt subwoofer, but the Disco is packing more than just a quality sound system. It also features a built-in rechargeable battery that allows you to take it with you just about anywhere. The tech specs say that the battery is good for anywhere from 3 to 10 hours, depending on volume, and in my testing I was routinely getting 8-9 hours on a moderate setting. That’s plenty of time for most single-day outings, but you’ll want to pack the charger along with you if you take it on a trip.

While I found the Disco to be a high quality product, with better sound than I was expecting, I do wish it were a bit more portable. It is slightly more than a foot in length and weighs in at 2.5 pounds. As someone who likes to travel light, that’s a bit on the heavy side for my liking. I love having it around the home and for day trips in town, but I’m not sure I’d want to add it to my suitcase or backpack when I’m heading out for a longer trip.

SuperTooth saw fit to include a speaker cable and a decent carrying case in the box, but I wouldn’t have minded having a remote control as well. While most of the time you’re controlling the music and volume from the phone itself, it would have been nice to be able to pause, skip tracks and control the bass booster from across the room too. Once you get accustomed to wirelessly controlling your audio, it is a bit jarring to have to cross the room to adjust a setting.

All of that said, this is one of the better portable Bluetooth speaker systems that I’ve come across, particularly for the money. The SuperTooth Disco carries an affordable price tag of just $149, which is actually a steal for a device with these features and high quality sound. In fact, I’ve used systems from competitors that cost much more but didn’t sound nearly as nice.

If you’re looking for a great way to wirelessly listen to your favorite music, podcasts and streaming audio, either at home or on the road, then the SuperTooth Disco is a great option. Simply put, you’ll have a very hard time finding anything else that sounds this good in the same price range.

Unusual Tourist Attraction: Japanese City Unveils World’s Largest Toilet

by Jessica Festa on

While most travelers spend time visiting sites like churches, castles, parks and museums, Ichihara City in the Chiba Prefecture of Japan is hoping to bring in tourists with a new kind of attraction: the world’s largest toilet. In fact, they’re so hopeful that the unusual attraction will bring in travelers; they’ve spent 10 million yen (about $125,945) on the project.

The site, which sits in front of Itabu Station on the Kominato Railway Line, is actually your average-sized toilet; however, it’s housed in a giant clear box and sits on an expansive 2,153 square-foot plot of land. While it doesn’t provide much privacy on the property, there is a surrounding fence to hide the toilet from outsiders. The city is hoping the beautiful new toilet will provide an enjoyable reprieve for drivers and passengers of the train, as well as attendees of next year’s Ichihara Art Festival.

Right now, the lavish restroom is only open to women, although the designer of the toilet, Sou Fujimoto, wants it to be open to the public for everyone to enjoy.

“I could enjoy the spectacular view while still feeling protected,” the architect told the Japan Times. “No other toilet would allow you a feeling like that.”