New Years Eve at the BEACH!

I have never really been a big fan of New Year’s Eve… I passed most of my early twenties when my friends were out boozing a teetotaller, so New Year’s Eve, if I bothered to go out at all, often consisted of me holding friends heads over the tops of buckets as they puked their guts out! So I never bothered to celebrate the holiday much in the traditional sense, although I have been in some memorable locations for New Year over the years: Tian’anmen Square in China, Khaosan Rd in Thailand, Krakow in Poland, a few in Japan, one in Cairns, as well as the countless I’ve passed in Melbourne… This year was special, not only because I can add another country and continent to the list, but because I had one of the most fun nights-out that I’ve had since I left Australia.

I was determined to spend New Year’s Eve at a beach somewhere… After months of travelling in the mountains, I’d missed the ocean and I was hanging out for some tropical warmth that I’d figured would come with the fact that I was smack bang in the middle of the tropics… So I decided to head for a beach town of Huanchaco, about 500km north of Lima... I’d heard better things about Mancora, a town further north near the border of Ecuador, but I discovered it was seriously booked out and over-priced for the week over new year, so decided to go with my second-choice beach town of Huanchaco (pronounced ‘one-chuck-oh’ for anyone that cares).

I turned up in the early hours of the morning on the 31^st and was incredibly lucky to find a dorm bed free in the first place that I tried… So I crashed for a couple of hours, and when I awoke I discovered that I was sharing a dorm with the two English guys that I met and spent a few days with during my first week in South America, way back in Chile. Paul and Jeff were great fun, friendly, lively and I’d been following their travels through facebook, hoping to meet them again. I’d known that they were possibly going to be in Huanchaco for New Year, and had hoped to meet up with them, but I didn’t expect that I would find myself in the same room! I’d expected to have to spend the day chasing them down, but I was rapt to have found them so quickly.

However, I have to say that the weather in Huanchaco was somewhat of a disappointment. Blazing hot while the sun shone, as soon as the sun went down the weather turned cool, and I needed three layers to keep warm in the evening! And don’t get me started on the water! The water in the ocean was absolutely FREEZING! At 8 degrees south of the equator I expected that the water would be tropical and warm, but water comes up the coast of South America directly from the Antarctic, and hence, despite the tropical location, neither the weather nor the water could be classed as tropical. I still don’t properly understand it, but for whatever reason the rules that govern weather in South America are different from the rest of the world, and that’s all there is to understand.

Anyway, the hostal we were staying in, a charming budget place called Naylamp, were providing a fire for the celebration, but we had to provide the meat for the barbecue ourselves… So during the day, Paul and Jeff and I, along with a lovely German girl called Anne, went shopping for meat, salads, and wine to share. Jeff was the designated cook and made our plain meat seem like a gourmet meal… After the meal we headed to the beach for the midnight countdown to let of the fireworks that Jeff had purchased with the excitement of a five-year old in a toy shop. The beach was packed with thousands of groups of people each having their own private celebration.

We were seated near a Peruvian family who were celebrating in style, dancing together from the young children to the grandparents. I think it might have been the alcohol induced fuzziness, or perhaps just the spirit of togetherness that I felt because of the celebration, but I saw nothing wrong with joining in on their celebration and dancing with them… They had peruvian salsa music pumped up loud from their car, and had a crackling fire, and they looked like they were having so much fun, and I was cold and bored with our party after we’d finished the fireworks… Rather than thinking ‘get this crazy, drunk foreign lady away from us’ which they would have been well within their rights to do, they were so warm and welcoming and seemed overjoyed to have us dance with them. Importantly, they shared their champagne with us (we had champagne to toast the new year with, but it was so bad that it was almost undrinkable, which is what happens if you pick the cheapest thing in the supermarket!)…

After a bit of dancing, the others went off to bed, but I was having so much fun that I stayed, and the family took turns dancing with me. After I’d danced a few dances, during which the lady who appeared to be the head of the family had been watching me, she turned to me and announced in a kind of official tone, ‘you know, for a gringa, you can dance’. I seemed to have passed her test, but I couldn’t help laughing at the qualification ‘for a gringa’ and took it up as a challenge to show what I could really do! So I decided to show off a little, and let my hair down and move! My favourite dance partners were the grandmother, who had hips that moved like she was still a teenager, and the matriarch’s son Luis, who at age 10, had moves that I don’t see from some of the most experienced salsa dancers in Australia. He knew exactly how to lead, and had a sense of rhythm that is so innate it just can’t be taught, and pushed and pulled me around the sand like we were in dirty dancing! After a few dances, Luis’s mum said ‘I was wrong, you can move better than most of us! Where did you learn to dance?’ She didn’t believe her when I told her I’d only learnt in Australia!

Getting close to 3am I was getting tired, and kept trying to leave, but the family wouldn’t let me go. They would appoint someone new to dance with me, and I couldn’t say no. But they didn’t look like they were going to stop! They were still cooking food on their barbecue, and looked like they were going to start eating AGAIN! I have to confess that they all outlasted me, and sometime a little after 3 I pulled myself away and headed to bed. But that one interaction completely changed the way that I’d felt about Peru. Before that night I was still ambivalent about the country. I’d felt that it was too touristy and I hadn’t yet found anything that made me absolutely love it. Dancing with the Peruvian family while listening to Peruvian music and eating Peruvian food until the early hours of the morning, and being so thoroughly welcomed and embraced by them, was one of the highlights of my trip so far. The night will be what I think of first when I think about Peru... the memory will surpass even the view of Machu Picchu as my defining image of the country, that I ended up falling in love with after all…