Three months alone in South America

Deepa Bharath

For three months, John Rinek didn’t hear much.

Just his inner voice and the crashing of waves.

The 22-year-old Newport Beach man took a three-month solo

photography and surfing trek along the coast of Peru and Chile that

ended Oct. 16. It was an amazing journey for the aspiring

photographer who captured more than 3,500 snapshots of South American

coastal living on film -- a life starkly different from the affluent

coast he was raised on.

Armed with his equipment, the utterly awestruck Rinek skimmed

through the salt water, desert, lakes, rivers and a landscape

nestling rich heritage, intriguing yet colorful personalities and an

ancient civilization.

Be it riding 16-foot waves in Punte de Lobos, sandboarding rapidly

down a giant, steep desert dune in Arequipa or taking in the view of

a canyon bigger than the Grand Canyon, the experience was truly

stimulating, Rinek said.

But what he enjoyed most was being in sync with nature at one of

the national parks in Chile where he camped for a week.

“It snowed one night and the ground just suddenly became all

white,” Rinek said. “The glaciers, the lakes, the towering mountains

-- it was beautiful.”

Going horseback riding to look at the Inca ruins was also a

delectable experience. There were ruins just up the hill from his

hostel that the natives called “Saqsaywaman” -- which, even when said

in Spanish, sounded like “sexy woman,” Rinek said.

Toward the end of the trip, Rinek could almost converse in

Spanish, but sometimes messed up similar-sounding words such as dias

(day) and dios (god).

“So I’d say ‘Good God’ for ‘Good day’ and people were wondering

what I was talking about,” he said with a laugh.

The town of Cuzco, snuggled in a valley between a circle of

mountains, fascinated him, Rinek said. Everyone in that town has a

ceramic tile roof on their house that overlooks cobblestoned streets,

he said.

A surfer all of his life, Rinek relished the humungous waves he

surfed with the locals off the Chilean coast.

For him, traveling through a Third-World country was like a

living, breathing paradox.

“I didn’t quite know what to expect,” he said. “There were some

villages where the homes didn’t have roofs. But there were cities as

well that looked like, well, a second-world city.”

Being by himself for the first time in an alien setting was a

novel experience.

“It was almost a test,” he said. “It’s fun, though. You can do

what you want when you want to do it.”

As the photographer in him peeled the layers off each and every

scene to capture its essence, the philosopher in him sometimes

strolled away to do some soul searching.

“My mind would talk to itself a lot,” Rinek said. “Mostly about

what I’m doing with my life. I’ve always known what I wanted to do,

but this just helped set it a little more solid in my brain.”