Totally Kooked Tuesday Surf & Culture Report

Lost Boys & Co...

 

So, the famous Morgalini invited us to join this morning and take a look at her new boyfriend (read: surfboard.)  Well he was pretty damned fabulous and for sure we were jelly, but hey, we came to surf!  So the Professor takes off on this nice little peeler, goes from the pier bowl to the end of the berm.  Nice.  Then there's this little left.  Doesn't hold up very long, but he gets a nice chop off the bottom.  Looks like he's resonating with the conditions...  Not so fast.  #3 swings through and he knuckles both feet and does a head-dip in the middle of this four footer and faceplants.  Things like this happen...  He shakes it off and #4 looms up sweet and fast and swings around and takes four paddles on a five paddle wave.  He goes over the falls like a guy from Riverside throwing a crab net into a shallow hole.  Meanwhile Morgalini is catching wave after perfect wave, hanging toes and in general showing us how it's done...  Some days you're just a total kook...

These salt works #1, are on the way down to the Sacred Valley.  Read this: 

"Since pre-Inca times, salt has been obtained in Maras by evaporating salty water from a local subterranean stream. The highly salty (hot) water emerges at a spring, a natural outlet of the underground stream. The flow is directed into an intricate system of tiny channels constructed so that the water runs gradually down onto the several hundred ancient terraced ponds. Almost all the ponds are less than four meters square in area, and none exceeds thirty centimeters in depth. All are necessarily shaped into polygons with the flow of water carefully controlled and monitored by the workers. The depth of the ponds slowly decreases, so that the water may flow through the myriad branches of the water-supply channels and be introduced slowly through a notch in one sidewall of each pond. The proper maintenance of the adjacent feeder channel, the side walls and the water-entry notch, the pond's bottom surface, the quantity of water, and the removal of accumulated salt deposits requires close cooperation among the community of users. It is agreed among local residents and pond workers that the cooperative system was established during the time of the Incas, if not earlier. As water evaporates from the sun-warmed ponds, the water becomes supersaturated and salt precipitates as various size crystals onto the inner surfaces of a pond's earthen walls and on the pond's earthen floor. The pond's keeper then closes the water-feeder notch and allows the pond to go dry." (Wikipedia)  They scrape the salt from the ponds, like they have forever and use it locally...

#2 Yes, this is where we're headed...

#3  You can't imagine how happy being in a situation like this makes LoLa.  Okay, maybe you can.  At this point it was all we could do to keep her from running up the trail.  Oh yeah, that's a train track below.  When you head down you get to take the train from Aguas Caliente back to Km. 82.  The Professor kept asking, "If it comes back, can't you take it the other way?"  Simple answer:  "No." or "Not with this group."

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"When the surf breaks, we'll fix it..."
 The Professor!!