Life is endlessly strange. I suspected I would make good friends when I came here to Peru but the friendship I found with Stephen and Rupert over the last two and a half months has been something so left field and unexpected I think it will take a long time to fully comprehend it. This was all the more compacted at the start of last week when they both had to leave, one after the other, and return home, respectively to Ireland and England. I think it is easy to forget sometimes how vital our friends are. I found it all too easy in recent years to forget how deep a real friendship can go and how powerful an effect the presence of real friendship can have upon your life. Time here has been one long reminder of how wonderful great friendship can be. It was not grand friendship compounded by big memories and intense shared experience. It was friendship forged by the continual amalgamation of days spent working together and all the laughter, frustration and ideas that made up the foundations of those days. It was a durable friendship, one not easily dulled by the rub of close habitation and familiarity. A friendship that was born of happenstance, shared humour and common belief.

I accompanied Rupert out to the bus terminal last monday lunchtime. It was his last day and we left, appropriately enough, in a tuck tuck, loaded to the gills with his rucksacks over our knees. Riding down the Pan American highway in a familiar oven of heat and dust, it was not the sort of environment that would normally make you want to reach for a dram, nevertheless that’s exactly what we did. Rupert still had a miniature of Old Pulteney 12yo that his girlfriend had sent him as part of a care package from home over a month ago, we shared it as a silent digestive for the two ice lollies we had just bought for the road.

I don’t drink a lot of whisky here, so by default the quality of any dram I have is magnified out of all proportion by the distortion of starvation. I have probably said this a lot since I travelled here to Peru, in fact anytime I taste anything even remotely resembling decent whisky I have to restrain myself from writing an instantaneous blog post about how I have just discovered the greatest dram of all time. The best example was when Stephen and I were cooking breakfast for St Patrick’s day last week, for the Irish Coffee we had decided to serve we procured a bottle of Johnny Walker Red Label. I can officially say that standing in a muggy kitchen at 7am in the morning necking Red Label from the bottle and giggling like besotted schoolgirls is up there along with sipping 1950′s Highland Park as a divine whisky experience. In that foxhole of a kitchen Red Label was the greatest dram on earth and I was on cloud nine.

I always liked Old Pulteney, all of the range appeal to me. I love the coastal edge it always has, it has never disappointed me as a whisky, seemingly always fresh, zippy and flavoursome. But I was still surprised when I drank it in the back of that mototaxi though. I’ll admit that glugging whisky from a miniature bottle in the heat of a desert afternoon while simultaneously having your spine grated down by the suspension free ride is not the most honest olfactory environment in which to judge a whisky. However I was still taken aback by how intense the flavour of that simple whisky was to me. It reminded me of when I would be fortunate enough to have a sip of my Dad’s whisky when I was growing up. The privileged sensation of staying up late with the grownups while on a trip to Scotland and having a quiet taste of a 10yo Talisker. Those are some of the most powerful whisky memories to me, and as I sat in silence with Rupert in this horrible motorised metal bubble and passed the mini back and forth, I realised that the taste of this memory would stay with me forever as well. It is a potent experience that can make you feel like you are drinking whisky for the first time. To me that whisky was nothing but pure beauty and it seemed like the perfect liquid score to two grown men waiting silently to say goodbye to each other for a long time and trying not to cry. It also hit home just how much whisky relies on circumstance and company, a moment with a truly great friend can transform even the most mundane spirit into something special. Without vital people to share a whisky with it really is a drink without a soul, a pleasant collection of composed and naturally aided compounds and vapours, one that only comes alive when it can be bounced around the pitch of shared experience.

I will miss Rupert and Stephen, while I’m sad they’re gone from PSF I am keenly aware of the fact that you can never be so sad that it makes the experience not worthwhile. I’ll see them again when I return to the UK later this year but to say goodbye and watch them leave this place and this experience, something we’ll probably never have again, is undeniably hard. In the meantime I still have work to do here in Pisco, not to mention further traveling. I’ll just have to remember to bring a bottle of Old Pultney next time I see them.

It’s been a long time since my last post. This is largely due to epic quantities of work here at PSF and many ‘extra curricular ‘ activities at the weekends as well. Activities like trips to the Ocucaje desert.

The Ocucaje Desert in all its silent splendor.

The Ocucaje Desert is infamous as a fossil hunting ground for everyone from homely geologists to determined smugglers. It is essentially a forty five million year old fossilized sea floor. Parts of the desert are so startling in their oceanic qualities, with endless beds of wind worn shells and partially exposed whale skeletons, that just being there spaces you out too far to fully grasp what you are looking at.

One of many ancient whale skeletons that the desert coughs up every few years after erosion and sand reallocation.

Our guide was a man of spectacular and commendable madness named Roberto Penny Cabrera. A native Peruvian, although a direct descendent of the conquistadors apparently, he spoke technically excellent English of which only 30% was understandable due to his own brand of passion infused, sanity starved ranting. During the four hour drive into the desert from Ica we gathered that Paleontologists and Archaeologists were the enemy, but that Geologists were acceptable. We also learned that he had forgotten it was his birthday the next day, his main interest was in brains and asteroids and that he knew of a spot on a woman that when touched would make her “…open like a flower!”

Roberto in all his glory. My friend Rupert having a bit of wander in the background.

We saw many things in the desert, we saw things so thick and fast that the one day we spent there felt like time expanded across a whole week. Whole days of experience concentrated into one pure and endless scattering of hours. We saw the fossil beds, the whale skeleton with crystallized brain tissue, a gorge cast in waves of corrugated rock walls by moulds of air over countless millennia. We saw human remains scattered across an ancient burial ground that belonged to the Paracas People, the exposed bones and fabric discarded like strewn fragments of brilliant white china, brittle, forgotten and unknown. The hands of what might have been children were draped across the desert floor, some still with mummified skin and fingernails attached. In short, we agreed it was one of the best weekends of our lives.

One of the many bones lying idle in the Ocucaje.

But of all the endless wonders we were exposed to in the desert there was one thing that struck me more than any other. It was in the darkness the night we arrived, after we pitched the tent and sat down underneath one of the most star drenched skies we ever saw, it was the silence. Not just the quiet you get in a deserted forest, not even the kind of quiet you get in the remotest parts of Scotland or another country. Here there was nothing, not a single lick of breeze, no distant breath of aircraft in the skies, no occasional flicker from a far off highway, no creatures, no life, only the fossilized sound of extinction all around us. The silence was deafening, heavy and thick. A transparent weight across the night through which you looked at magnified stars. Every patch of sky threw up a dusty splatter of milky way that you had never seen before, each new corner revealed quiet shooting stars and the infinite fizz of the universe. All filtered through the greatest absence of noise you could ever hope to hear. The only piece of music that springs to mind is this one, perhaps it would be one of the only places on earth you could truly ‘hear’ this music.

For all that this piece of music has been mocked in its time, its purpose is not really directly musical. Here at PSF there is a communal courtyard that is filled with people working during the day and at night with people relaxing, socialising, drinking and eating. The volunteers change as people come and go, the jobs change the work changes and the only constants are the tick tock of day and night, the heat of the sun and the endless carnage of music that is played from our speakers all the time. I am driven often to distraction with the kinds of music played here so endlessly, music that is not my taste at all that is rendered even more aurally poisonous when re-mixed with the whine of circular saws in the yard and the bleating traffic outside the house. One man’s music is another man’s noise and like the piece by Mr John Cage above, the desert reminded me that sometimes a true and deep love of music is reliant upon its occasional absence, sometimes silence is the missing part of life’s score. The desert was the most silent place I’ve ever been, it made our slow return to civilization a noisy one. Now I hear the cars outside my window and the shrieks of the nighttime in Pisco with a greater sensitivity than I thought possible, now the cacophony is a symphony of pain. But I wouldn’t change the experience of the desert, no matter how loud things get.

I thought quite hard about what whisky I might have chosen for this experience if I could have taken one with me. In retrospect it’s probably for the best that I didn’t. Knowing me I would have opted for something obscenely delicious, expensive and silly. The problem is that swimming in pure, liquid silence under a field of stars is something of a humbling experience, if you’re going to drink anything with it it should really be as unassuming and quietly beautiful as possible. That’s where the old official Longmorn 15 comes in. Leaving aside the olfactory beauty of these old Longmorns for a moment, it is worth remembering that for a long time this was an under-appreciated bottling, especially in its glory years of the late 80s and early 90s. So to drink one now is something of a quietly special experience, a moment when you can reflect on what a great and simply delicious drink whisky can be and so often is when it works. When all the bullshit is stripped away and you are left with only a simply put together yet beautifully crafted spirit. These old Longmorns are among the best bottlings, in my opinion, at reflecting this. It is whisky at its most honest and humbling, uncomplicated, delicious and satisfying. Not something to be precious about but something to respect, share and love. I would have loved to have had a bottle of this that night in the desert, to have shared it with Rupert, Stephen and Walter, the friends I travelled there with. I miss whisky, but at least I know there is plenty of it awaiting me upon my return home, I might never go back to that desert and to have shared it then with such great people is an experience that probably not even whisky could have improved. The silence was intoxicating enough.

ps: That spot was the big toe (apparently).