Lima, March 1, 2000

Hey all.

Well, the journey has begun. I am currently on my way to Chile, together with my friend Bryan Ward. For those of you who don't know Bryan, he's about 2.03 meters tall (that's about 6'8'', for you Americans), has long blonde hair and a deep voice.

On Monday morning we started out from Quito. The bus down to Huaquillas, on the Peruvian border, took a good thirteen hours, but cost less than $4.00. Once we were out of Quito and heading down towards the coast, they showed cheesy action movies for the whole trip on the on-board video system. At about 10:00 pm we hit Machala, where most people got out of the bus. Bryan and I each had a double seat to ourselves now, and we both went to sleep. We didn't wake up until the bus driver was backing his bus into his garage in Huaquillas. It was midnight, and we decided that the border crossing was probably closed, so we looked for a cheap hotel. The first three we asked at were full, and the fourth only had a double bed. We took it (a double bed has more surface area than the tent that Bryan and I have shared in the past, so it was no big deal), but the drunk guy who had led us to this hotel wanted a substantial tip. The room was like $3 for the two of us, and we didn't care much that there was no hot water. The missing window screens were more annoying (we had to use one of those infernal gauze tents over the bed to keep the mosquitoes away).

The next day we went out towards the border. One thing you learn about borders is that you usually get ripped off. Never judge a country by the experiences you have at the border. Most countries I have visited would not do well by that criterion.

Anyway, we were suckered in by two guys making us believe that there were no buses to Tumbes, the next town in Peru. They said they could drive us down for like fifteen dollars, but there were complications because we had arrived asleep around midnight the night before, and not been checked out of Ecuador. So while we were doing that we found out that there WERE buses from the Peruvian control to Tumbes (the situation was complicated by the fact that the Ecuadorian and Peruvian border controls are like 8 km apart), so we ditched these guys, but not until they had made a killing from us with their sob-stories about how much we owe them for them having driven us to control, spent their time waiting, etc.

It's often interesting to see the frequency of some things in one country that are completely absent in its nextdoor neighbour. Such are the motorcycle taxis in Peru. The front half looks like a motorbike, the back half more like a carriage. The passengers get in the back and are driven around. I doubt whether there is a single one of these contraptions in all of Ecuador, but the moment you cross the bridge that marks the border, they are all around you. Bryan and I had a ride in a motorbike taxi, took care of our visa (the guy on the Ecuadorian side had not been very friendly, but the Peruvians were nice enough, considering the nature of their job), and took the bus to Tumbes.
It's usually hard to know whom to trust when you're travelling. Especially when you look like a tourist with a big backpack and a caucasian complexion (easily extorted). But we found a woman who was also heading towards Lima, and she said she knew a quicker, cheaper way to get there than taking the TEPSA (Peruvian version of Greyhound) bus directly from Tumbes. Since she was taking the route herself, we sort of trusted her. The first stretch we went in a "Colectivo", which is what they call the sort of moving van cars that function as buses between towns. After a few hours of riding right alongside the Pacific Ocean we reached the town of Talara, where we got into a TEPSA bound for Lima. Late in the evening, we stopped in some town along the way and had some dinner. We got beefsteak and rice for like $2, and it was good because since Monday morning we had only been living on biscuits and water. Of course, you don't burn many calories sitting in a bus.

The landscape has not changed much since we crossed the border. It was at varying degrees of dry pretty much the whole way through. Lima is not a particularly pretty city, but it does look better than I remember it looking.
And here we are, it's Wednesday morning and our connecting bus to the Chilean border leaves in a few hours. It will be a 38 hour ride still, which is somewhat scary considering that our ride from Huaquillas to Lima only took about 22 hours and wiped us (or me at least) out quite thoroughly. I hit my tailbone in the colectivo, so it has not been comfortable sitting in the bus. Sleeping in the bus seat wasn't that bad, but the driver had to keep stopping for extended breaks all through the night, and people would talk loudly. But the bus we were in made the coolest prolonged grating sound every time it was put back in gear, and hearing that sound made every break well worth it.

Well, more to come later, probably from Chile.

Marco

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