When we last left our fearless travelers, they were just leaving Banos to make the long trip south to Peru.
We knew when we bought our tickets to Quito that we would have to bomb down to Peru to make it to the orphanage by August 20th. What we didn't know was that we would travel on buses for 30+ hours in 3 days.
We took a series of daytime bus rides between cities in southern Ecuador and watched the beautiful Ecuadorian countryside roll by.
Then we boarded our first night bus in Loja on Monday night. We slept for a while and were awakened at 3:30 AM at the Peruvian border. Our bus driver had to rattle the chain link fence to get the guard to wake up and let us through. When the guard emerged, he was clad only in a towel and a pot belly. We made it through immigration with no problems at all, thankfully, and we fell back asleep only to be awakened by Charlie Manson (or maybe it was his younger brother) who told us we had arrived in Piura, Peru.
Maybe it was the abrupt wake up, or maybe the landscape of desolate desert, but we were pretty unprepared for what we saw when we got out of the bus station in Piura. There were so many people, markets built of brick and tarps, tuk tuk taxis and stray dogs galore. Here's a picture of a hairless Peruvian dog.
We went back inside and luckily a nun gave us directions to catch the bus to Trujillo. We made the 7 hour trip to Trujillo and caught a taxi up to the surf village of Huanchaco. As we were lulled to sleep by the sound of the Pacific Ocean, we knew the whole ordeal had been worthwhile. And now we eat, we drink, we rest and we surf.
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