MG's incessant swapping between UK and US passports in order to enter a country by car and leave by plane without paying import duties finally caught up with us and the Ecuador / Peruvian border at Tumbes, and had a minor nightmare with the to-ing and fro-ing between offices, located 4km apart.
Eventually we got free and headed down the coast. with a nights stop at a hostel with 13 hairless dogs in a small seaside town Zorritos. The following night we made it to Mancora, a great surfing spot (apparently) but non-surfers E-J and MG opted for the mud hot bath a 15 minute drive up the road, where we met a Peruvian family who seemed less bothered by the smelly water and floating hairs than us. We took some photos of all of us with our Polaroid (thanks Mills!) and gave it to the disbelieving children as presents. Later we ate dinner at a bar called Fluid (with Charterhouse Street inspiration), managed by the only Englishman in town, ex manager of the Oxo Tower and an intriguing chap. He had a couple of guns and sniffed between sentences. Their sushi was excellent and we put away a few glasses of wine. Next morning we had breakfast and MG erroneously ordered a white coffee which tasted a little off.
Back on the Panamericana and we pulled upside a family of bikers who were clearly fellow 'overlanders'. It turned out they were a Dutch/ English family with two young children travelling on two motorbikes for a couple of years. We were amazed that they had chosen to do the trip with such young children who by all accounts weren't appreciating the journey quite as much as their parents were. 'Its boring!!' one of them said when we asked how they were enjoying travelling around Latin America on motorbikes with their parents.
After a promise to ourselves that we always either stop somewhere for lunch or make our own to break up the days journey, we decided on the town of Lambayeque which has a very unexpected and remarkable museum called Museo Tumbas Reales De Sipan. It is designed specifically to showcase the finds of the Royal Tombs of Sipan and contains ceramics representing gods, people, plants, llamas and other animals as well as beautiful reconstructed jewellery and exact reproductions of how the tombs were found. After the museum we paid a trip to the locally recommended restaurant of El Cantaro where we ate.....
We continued down the coast. Peru is huge. Hours of driving results in millimetres of progress on the map. We got to Huanchaco at night and stayed at a lovely place called Huanchaco's Garden with their sweet and very affectionate dog, Tony. Having discussed our considerable overspend in December, we decided South America was all about camping and so we would reconfigure our inventory accordingly. So the next morning we reorganised a few boxes in the back and gave away the nice-to-haves and kept the must-haves. With the extra room we'd be able to bring our camping equipment up to scratch (and, as it turned out, spend alot more money).
Day 3 and we were ready to turn inland, towards the Andes. We opted for the scenic rough road route through the canyon which took us about an hour to find. The quality of the road and the state of the weather worsened in unison. The scenery, on the other hand, became progressively more dramatic.
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As the day progressed, the weather began to turn and the rain set in. After a few hours on the road, we came to a small traffic jam. After a little investigation we identified the problem as being a landslide up ahead which had blocked the road off. A bunch of locals were busy clearing it so after only an hour or so's wait we were able to continue. The rain, however was not clearing and the visibility was getting progressively worse, as were the rockslides off the unprotected hills around us. At about 4pm a stone or two smacked into the side of the car with a daunting thud. MG's coffee and old milk was coming back to haunt him. Stopping in tunnels for shelter from the rain to go to the toilet was not a fun experience, especially when the bats took flight. Eventually we approached a tunnel whose entrance was entirely covered by rocks. We regretfully turned around and found a terrible, terrible hotel in the town just before Caraz. Kids and women screaming above the disco volume stereo, MG ran for the bathroom and hurled a couple of days food. His vomiting was as loud as it gets but went about as undetected as a pin prick in the general mayhem. MG felt much better, and we got some sleep when the stereo finally turned off about 3am. The next morning we set back off to Huaraz, the road cleared by someone keener than us.
