I returned to the beach but never really left . . . I stored it in my left ear and wake each morning with little sand bars running from my eyes. Despite climbing 1000+ meters up to the desert plateau the wind never ceased to blow. Dust/sand devils swirled over the road knocking me all over the place as I went across the plateau then dropped back to the coast. Originally, I wanted to stay on the coast but after asking around everyone insisted there was no passable road so I was forced to ride 225 kilometers around to cover less than 100 kilometers of coastline between Camana and Mollendo. There is a dotted line but I haven't forgotten my last one yet and pushing my bike through sand and over cliffs in a desert sounded like a drag. Turns out the area is seismically active giving rise to tsunamis and the there appears to be a fault line between Camana and Mollendo. Explains why some of the beach front resorts looking like they were hit by a tsunami . . . they were less than a decade ago when a earthquake caused the shorelines to measurable drop in this region.
The plateau was similarly dry like the coast only higher with no ocean and the occasional large oasis-es of agriculture watered by the Andes. At the edges of the irrigated land are pueblos jovenes of reed mat boxes waiting to get title to their land and the eventual arrival of water, hopefully. The areas with irrigation are packed solid with crops and small homes which ironically made it difficult to find a quiet spot to camp as night fell and I stayed in a cheap hotel at the edge of town that had a good view of volcanoes towering in the distance and a small river valley below.I noticed that when I ran the water or flushed the toilet you could hear the water come out the pipe at back of the hotel to the valley below.
I debated swinging through Arequipa, Peru's second largest city, but I have overstayed my entry stamp by two weeks now, it was another 3-4000 feet higher, and I like being on the ocean. The Pan-Americana is busy with petroleum tankers coming up and down from the port near Mollendo. Mollendo is a small port city, however the majority of shipping has moved 10 km north to the new port of Matarani with a larger more secure harbor. Mollendo is left with some great architecture and nice beaches that attract the hordes at the official start of summer in January.The water is cold but no worse than the New Hampshire or Maine coast in summer time and it even has the ruins of an old castle on a bluff overlooking the beach.