Travelogue

I was loving San Pedro. The warm sunshine, the lovely small town feel, the hammocks in the hostel. It was great to just kick back and enjoy the basics after a full-on-couple-of-months through Peru and Bolivia. Sandra turned up at the Residenial Vilacoya at around 12pm on Sunday 6th and found me exactly as I had been for the last couple of days: Chilling in a hammock! It wasn’t long before she joined me and we caught up with each others adventures.

After a few days in San Pedro the one noticeable thing was the dogs. They’re everywhere. In the day they mostly sleep in the shade, wherever they find it, but at night they kind of stroll around town in big packs, almost like they own the town. Some dogs take up their positions in the doorways of Cafes, Restaurants and shops, kind of like guard dogs, while the others are on the hunt. This normally involved a hungry pack of males fighting for the attention of a surrounded and hounded female. These dogs would be haring around town all night until the victor would claim his prize in front of a full audience, and they weren’t fussy about where the stage was!

In this one, not-isolated, incident it happened to be a small Panaderia (Bakers) and there wasn’t a thing the poor owner could do to stop them. Eventually a bucket of water was produced but that only managed to remove them to just outside her shop entrance. Much later the dogs could be seen resting up by the side of the main street. The ‘top’ dog next to his ‘prize’ and all the other contenders in close proximity. I’ve really never seen anything like this before.
One other thing of note is that all dogs, so far throughout South America, seem to be extremely wary of humans. And the majority carry a limp. Sadly I think it has something to with most dogs getting beaten from a very young age. Here, dogs are just dogs…