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.”
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