MUNGO EATS Latin America

Our first full day in Peru, and it was not at all what I expected.  We started the day off pretty high, about 1300m.  For the first time since we started the drive, we saw rice fields.  Every Latin American  country eats rice, but this is the first place we have seen it growing.  There are huge fields of emerald green along the sides of the rivers and in the valleys.  It is really quite pretty. 

But not long into the drive and the scenery started to change, dramatically!  You would still see the odd rice field, but more and more, we started to see this.

We then went up and over a mountain pass, which peaked at almost 2200m, then down, down, down again.  I think tonight, we are at just around 100m.  This is what the scenery looks like now!

Gone are the curvy mountain roads, we drive miles and miles on straight, smoothly paved roads.  Quite a difference from yesterdays roads, which mostly looked like this.

We experienced our first Peruvian police stop today.  We were asked where we were driving from, where we were going to, our nationality and then asked if our trip had gone well today, and told to have a nice day.  No papers were checked or anything.  Hope all the stops are that easy. 

Tonight we are in a town called Chepen.  We actually intended to stop in the city of Chiclayo, but we couldn’t seem to spot any hotels, so we just kept driving.  It’s okay though, I think Chiclayo was a bit too hectic for me.  Tomorrow, ,we will hopefully only drive for a short time, destination…Trujillo.

Going back a ways, a map of our journey out of Colombia and into Ecuador:

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And across Ecuador:

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Finally, into Peru:

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We crossed into Peru today, leaving Ecuador behind, still slightly undiscovered.  There were three possible border crossings that we could have chosen.  The first one is near the coast, and since we were no where near the coast, it was not even a consideration.  If we had followed the PanAmericana south, we would come to the second most used crossing.  The last option was a sleepy little crossing directly south of Vilcabamba.  This crossing was only opened about 5 or 6 years ago, and there is always a question of the road conditions leading up to it.  The crossing appealed to us because it carried on in a direction we were already heading, was small (which hopefully meant less hectic) and it was still in the highlands (which hopefully meant still cool).  When we spoke to our hosts in Vilcabamba about the border crossing, they sounded less than optimistic.  They thought the road had been washed out a few years back and were unsure of it’s condition at this time.  They encouraged us to check with the bus station, because they were not even sure that buses ran south of Zumba, the last town of any size before the crossing.  The buses did run all the way to Zumba, which was most of the way, and the driver we checked with said the road to the border was open and passable, so we decided to give it a go. 

It was raining off and on and really, the road ended up being fairly rough, but it was mostly packed.  There were areas where there was a fair bit of mud on the road, and I was nervous about getting stuck in these areas, but Kevin assured me that the road was pretty solid beneath the mud.  He wasn’t worried.  At one point we had to wait for about 45 minutes or so while they MADE a road for us to cross, but all in all, we did okay.  It was slow mind you, but we reached the booming metropolis of Zumba before nightfall, and found out that what was ahead of us, was much the same as what we had gone through, so we felt good about that. 

We got a good start in the morning and headed to Peru.  The  road was as expected, slow, rough, but passable.  We got to the border crossing at about 10:30am.  I must say that it was the most enjoyable crossings to date.  You drive into the sleepy little town of La Balsa on the Ecuador side, and really just park anywhere.  We went to customs first, and there was no one in the office, but the girl in the store next to the office, went to fetch the official for us.  He just took our vehicle permit back, didn’t check any VIN numbers of anything and sent us on to immigration.  Our immigration official was wearing sweat pants.  When we entered Ecuador, we were given a small slip of paper each which had our personal information on it, that we were told not to lose.  We had to return these slips of paper on leaving the country.  The immigration official could only find 3 of the 4 slips in the passports and we discovered that Kevin’s was missing.  Kevin is the only one that has his passport handled other than at border crossings, because whenever we go through a traffic checkpoint, they always look at  his passport.  We assumed his slip of paper was lost somewhere along the way.  The official was not worried though, he just invented a new “enter the country form”, so that he could have an accompanying “leaving the country” form.  We were then done on the Ecuador side and needed to proceed to the Peru side of things.  Unfortunately, even though we were just at the customs office, he seemed to forget that we would need to get out of his country and we had to go ask him politely, if he could please raise the barricade, so we could leave.

On the Peru side at La Balza (just to be original), we started at immigration.  Our official here was wearing shorts and runners.  We then proceeded to the police, and I am not really sure what we accomplished there.  On his wall, was a poster, hand written, in felt on bristol board paper, which stated a police officers duties.  I can’t remember all the duties,  but a few were, “follow the law”, “be just” and my favorite, “have faith and optimism”!  The officer copied out our passport information, then signed each immigration form.  Was that our official police check?  Anyway, back to immigrations guy, who then stamped all the passports, then on to customs.  One customs officer was dressed in official looking clothes, but his partner,was wearing sweat pants and rubber boots (one step down from just sweat pants)!!  I think the officially dressed fellow was in charge, but he needed his buddy to tell him what to do.  The unfortunate thing was that he couldn’t seem to hear what his buddy was telling him, a little hard of hearing I think, so there was a lot of things repeated and repeated, and repeated.  I am not sure why the young, dressed down, guy couldn’t just do everything himself, instead of yelling the instructions out to the old guy, but it was pretty comical.  Like an Abbott and Costello skit.  Also, there were a bunch of chickens running around outside the offices.  Not really good looking chickens, ones with half their feathers missing, half bald chickens.  One chicken kept entering the customs office, and the officials would chase it out, but a few minutes later, it would wander back in.  I really had to work hard, not to burst out laughing. 

Finally, after customs, we were  going to go work on getting Mungo in, but the Ag official beat us to the punch and was standing next to the van waiting for us.  He really only needed to see Mungo’s rabies certificate, but looked at his other papers just to humour me.  He did not take any copies of our paperwork, and we did not receive any paperwork either.  When he saw the form that Ecuador issued Mungo, he kind of whistled and said it was very official looking, then he shook my hand and wished me a wonderful journey. 

Off we went into the Peruvian countryside.  We are VERY used to being stared at.  EVERYONE turns to watch the strange vehicle, filled with gringos go by, but in Peru, they added a new twist…they all wave!!  I felt  like the queen waving back at all my loyal subjects (that would make Mungo the Royal Hound!!) .  Really it was quite funny.

Tonight we are in Jae’n.  We will be heading towards the coast from here, and then south to Lima.  Looks like we will make it there in time!

The drive from Cuenca to Vilcabamba was pretty typical for the Ecuadorian Andes.  The road is almost never flat; you work your up and up the side of a valley, switchback after switchback; then back down more switchbacks into the next valley; and repeat.  Here is an elevation profile of Saturday’s drive:

It is 155 km from Cuenca to Vilcabamba, straight south as the buzzard flies.  But, with all the twists and turns in the road, the actual driving distance is 262 km!  A map showing some of our winding route:

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We are on the shores of the Yambala River, just a bit east of Vilcabamba.  Vilcabamba is a small town, with the fame of longevity of it’s residence.  Maybe it’s the mountain air.  In any case, we are staying a some cabins near the town.  We had a hard time finding the cabins.  We had directions from the website, and they seemed pretty clear when we read them:  take the eastward road out of town, until there is a Y in the road, then take the left arm of the Y to the cabins.  Sounds easy.  We knew we were in trouble when we looked at a map of the town and realized, hmm, there are two roads leaving the town to the east.  Problem number one.  The first east road didn’t feel right, so we quickly turned around and tried road number two.  The second problem was that there were several Y-ish roads branching off.  Which was the right one?  We finally did pick one, the most suggestive of a Y, but the road was gravel, not asphalt and the road just seemed to get rougher and rougher.  There were no signs whatsoever.  Finally we decided we must be wrong  and tried another road.  This one was wrong as well, but we did find someone who spoke English, who did tell us that our original choice of roads was  correct…we just had to drive 3 km up the rough, unsigned road.  I know that not very many tourists end up driving to these cabins, mostly they would just catch a cab from town, but really, would it kill them to put up ONE little sign?

There is a national park nearby and the people who run the cabins actually own a private nature reserve that borders the park, so there are may trails that you can hike, even 2 or 3 day trips from this location.  We decided to just walk a short hike to a waterfall.  We had directions (or so we thought) to guide us to the falls, but as we started walking, these directions became more and more ambiguous, less and less clear.  It became apparent to us that the cabin owners are not great with describing directions!!  We had pretty much given up hope of finding the falls and were just about to turn back when a young couple came down the trail and asked if we were going to the falls.  Their directions were much clearer that ours, so we ended  up following them to the falls.  It is always “worth it” to hike to waterfalls.

Tomorrow we strike out towards the Peruvian border.  I don’t think we will cross it, but we should get awfully close.