It wasn't all bad, I met a really nice couple from England/Mexico. They had retired early, sold everything, and have spent the last 3 years travelling the world. What a life - if only I had something of value to sell!
I had two border crossing options from Chachapoyas. One was 200km away but you could only travel during the day using collectivos and small buses, making it a two-day journey. The second involved a whopping 600km of winding mountain roads...but it was possible to take night buses, meaning I could do it in about a day (saving a night´s accommodation costs). I chose option two - go back on myself to Chiclayo (which I´d come through from Trujillo), before heading up to Piura. From there it was on to the border at Macara, before heading on to Loja and finally Cuenca, the first place I wanted to visit in Ecuador.
For some ridiculous reason there is an unwritten rule in Peru that every night bus must arrive at around 5am. The longer the journey, the earlier the bus leaves, but it is always scheduled to arrive at 5am. This is probably the most annoying thing about Peru - nothing is open at 5am and it's always dark! So, as usual, I found myself trying to get an hours sleep on my backpack on the floor of a bus stop in Chiclayo.
The second-most annoying thing about Peru is that there isn't usually a central bus terminal in the cities - each company has it's own terminal. I arrived with Movil Tours at 5am and decided to wait until their office opened at 6:30am to buy a ticket to Piura. Of course the office opened at about 7:15am and I joined the back of a large queue that had formed while I was having 3 minutes of sleep. After another 20 minutes in the Queue I asked for a ticket to Piura - "Sorry Sir, we don't have any buses to Piura today". Arse.
I walked a kilometer to the next bus terminal in the blazing sun, arriving at about 7:55am. There was a bus at 8am - hurray! But it was already full - boo! So I waited for the 9am departure. The 3hr bus to Piura had no air conditioning, suspension or legroom. The engine sounded like it was counting down the kilometers until it would explode and a small Peruvian man kept falling asleep on my shoulder. Despite all of this, I got more sleep than on the semi-cama night bus from Chachapoyas to Chiclayo!
When I got to Piura I realised I'd been really unlucky - we arrived at 12:30 and the bus to Ecuador had left at midday. The next one was at 9pm!! I therefore had an 8hr wait in the hot, dust-ridden town of Piura. There was one sight - a cathedral - still under construction. The main highlight was taking a ´motorised tricycle´ to the bus terminal. I had to keep moving my backpack so that the vehicle stayed balanced!
The bus to the border would not look out of place in a motor museum. The seats had an odd design - if you reclined the back rest the seat part slid forward a bit, pushing you towards the seat in front. The back rests reclined quite far back and the result was, if the person in front also reclined their seat, it was impossible to move out of your seat! This was less than ideal during the 30 second toilet stops...
We got to the border, at an international bridge across a large river running along the border, at about midnight. After clearing Peruvian customs you walk over the bridge into the darkness until you meet the Ecuadorian customs on the other side. It reminded me of the prisoner exchange scene in the James Bond film Die Another Day and I would not have been surprised if a metal-studded terrorist had passed me on the way.
We were about to leave when the Mexican/English couple were pulled off the bus by the Peruvian boarder control. We waited another hour before they finally got back on, looking a bit flustered. It turned out that the officials didn't believe she was Mexican and thought her passport was fake. They interrogated her for an hour before finally letting her get on the bus. I'm not sure what the Peruvians were doing, as we were on the Ecuadorian side, but there you go...
After that it was a bus to Loja. We arrived there at 6:50am and just managed to get on a bus to Cuenca leaving at 7am. So I'm now in Ecuador! Cuenca to be exact. And I'm going to bed.
No comments:
Post a Comment