We recently stayed at a beach town named Mancora in north Peru. We found a really cool hostel owned by a british man named Mark and his Peruvian wife Julia. The whole place was very whimsical and artistic and was all created by Mark and Julia’s imaginations. We booked it for 3 nights but ended up staying a week. The room was 99 Soles per night which equates to about $29 a night. We just loved it.

Here are two videos of our little apartment. One of the downstairs and one from the upstairs.

Here are some more pictures of our place and the beach

Our room had a small kitchen so we went to the local market and bought fresh vegetables, fruit, bread, pasta, beans and rice and cooked some really yummy meals to eat out on our little deck by the beach. I definitely think food tastes better when you’re eating it by the ocean 😊.

Here’s the market and a picture of Ivan cooking some veggie pasta 😁

While we were there we met a young German girl named Leah who had been traveling for over a year. She had recently gone to a spiritual retreat in a remote town in the Amazon basin and had worked with a local shaman for several days. At the end of the retreat she took part in a ceremony where they drank Ayahuasca tea. Ayahuasca is made from a hallucinogenic plant and has been used in South America for hundreds of years. It’s sometimes compared to Peyote, which has historically been used in rituals and medicines by people indigenous to North America. Leah said that she had to do a lot of preparation work to write and communicate what she wanted to learn about herself before she was allowed to attend the ceremony and drink the Ayahuasca. After she left the retreat, the shaman had told her to go for 32 days on a very specific diet and that she was not to touch another person (not even to shake hands) for that entire time. Hearing all about it was really interesting. Leah said that it had been a great experience.