Day at the Beach

On Sunday, to get away from Lima for a bit, we loaded ourselves into my cousin Juancho's and my uncle Willy's cars and headed down to Punta Hermosa, hoping for a change of scenery and a good seafood meal by the ocean.

Punta Hermosa is a a beach town a few kilometers south of Lima. It is just south of these islands, which face the long, long beach of San Pedro, where I often spent time with my friends the Zamudio's when I was a child. Their mom would pile us kids into her Mini and we'd drive down for the day. The surf was notoriously rough at that beach, but that just added to the excitement of it. The islands are called the San Pedro Islands, but are often referred to as The Whale.

As for Punta Hermosa itself, the water was quite rough today, but the town has a nice, curving beach, one end of which is marked by a small peninsula which was once an island separated from the mainland by a few dozen yards. As it was a favoured fishing spot, the townfolk built a causeway to it, and today due to the accumulation of sand along the causeway, it is no longer an island. It is presumed -no one seems to know for sure- that it was this outcropping that gave the locale its name as Punta Hermosa means "beatiful point."

Perhaps due to the rough surf or to some offshore feeding frenzy by large fish or dolphins, the beach was littered with pieces of jellyfish, including this singular chunck which led to all manner of crude jokes due to its resemblance to certain parts of a woman's anatomy.

We spent about and hour walking and playing on the beach before lunch at an ocean-front restaurant, and had a great time all around, before heading home and collapsing.

Here are two videos of the day. The first shows a crab crawling around my niece's leg and Mito rounding it up and then chasing his daughter down the beach with it. The second shows Mito with the girls braving the surf.