DESERT LEFTS

Bernd Roediger reflects on his return to Pacasmayo, Peru where he competed at the PWA / IWT World Cup in epic conditions. We hear about life in the camp, what it is like to ride one of the longest waves on the planet and how he dealt with one of the toughest heats of the contest!

- Bernd Roediger

Ah Peru! The beauty of a simple life. A traveller here can live with his feet in two worlds. That is, at once the country that contains mythic levels of aesthetic appeal, archaic mystery, the sensuousness of the jungle, here you can become a lover of all things archetypical to South America; and then in seconds the noise dies down, the fog rolls in, the mountains spill out into a vast coastal desert, this is the Peru that windsurfers will come to know, and here one is a hermit. There is something about miles of sand, a cold sea, the sun and moon, that allows one to unfurl his being out onto the nondescript features of that land and explore himself in it. In the movie Lawrence of Arabia Peter O’Toole as Lawrence says he is drawn to the desert because “It’s clean”, the real Lawrence said: This creed of the desert seemed inexpressible in words, and indeed in thought.

RETURN

If the impetus that draws humans to the great seas and to the great sands of the world are different, then they find synthesis in Pacasmayo. Pacasmayo, where the surreal sterility of dusty Andean steppes come to form a point in the temperate bath of life that is the South Pacific.