South to Peru

Fri/Sat 22/23 Jan 2010
So finally we are on our way. We left Quito at around 10am after finding out that there were yet more questions about how we were going to get the car returned to Ecuador from Chile. We had organised for a company to ship it from Santiago in Chile back to Quito, but just today they have said that they think there will be more costs because the car will be considered to be imported even though it is registered in Ecuador. No one here seems to be able to tell us what we need to do or how much anything will cost... yet more frustrations but we decided just to go anyway and try to sort something out later.
We left Quito heading south on the Panamerican highway. We had come back by the exact same route from Guayaquil but had arrived in the dark. This time we were able to see some fantastic views over the mountains to a snowcapped volcano that we assume is Cotopaxi but we couldn't confirm it because it didn't show up on our map. There are some serious road works going on through the mountains on the road West to Santo Domingo, suddenly you turn a corner and there are barrels in the road or a sudden drop in road level of a foot or so - quite terrifying. They are building some tunnels and also widening the winding mountain road, there are diggers balanced precariously on the edge of the cliffs and dumper trucks that appear out of nowhere. Then down, down along the edge of a river and into the heat of the coastal plain. South through endless banana plantations to Milagro where we stopped for the night. Milagro is the pineapple town of Ecuador so there were statues and pictures of pineapples everywhere. Apart from that there is not much nice to be said about Milagro. It is dirty and smelly, we looked for a bookstore to try to buy a road map of Peru but there is not one in the whole town! We wandered the streets after our 6 hours in the car but really found nothing of any note to tell you about.
On Saturday after a breakfast of drinking yoghurt and a bread roll we set off south towards the border. We got a little confused (as usual) due to the lack of road signs but we eventually found ourselves crossing a bridge that had a big sign over the top saying 'Welcome to Peru'. We hadn't even spotted any exit immigration offices on the Ecuador side and we had been warned that we must get a 'Permiso de Turismo' so that when the car comes back it will not be seen as an import. So we had to turn around and go into the border town of Huaquillas to find the immigration and customs offices. Of course they weren't anywhere near each other, nothing can be made simple here. So we filled out forms and queued at immigration to get our exit stamps and then drove through crowds and crowds of people to try and find the customs office. It was market day and the streets were full of stalls and men on bikes with huge trays of goods on the front. This is the main road to the border and it is completely blocked and soooooo frustrating. We had to get photocopies of this and that and the other, change money to Peruvian Soles at a street money changer and all in the crowds and the heat and the humidity. Finally we were ready to cross the border... we could have turned back and gone back over the first bridge we had gone over; but that would mean going back through the crowds; so we struggled onwards through more crowds and phut phut motorbike taxis that were overloaded with people and goods and that lurched without warning from one side to the other. At the Peruvian border control there was a little bit more of a sensible arrangement; at least the offices were right next to each other, first immigration and then some sort of transit police office to get a permission to drive in the country. Apart from the heat making it a very uncomfortable half hour it was all quite efficient and when we returned back to the car we found that we had been fumigated and had to pay for the pleasure, and also had to pay for having parked the car in front of the immigration office!!
We drove south with the sea at our right and high dunes at our left. The coastal region in Ecuador was so hot and humid but here it is hot and dry. No banana plantations, in fact very little vegetation at all, just shrubby bushes, very far apart and a few cacti. There are a lot of adobe structures and bamboo houses with leaf rooves, and towns that are strung out along the road but not a bank in sight. We stopped to get some petrol and found that it was about 3x the price than in Ecuador and we stopped for lunch and found that that too was really expensive compared to Ecuador, again about 3x the price. Finally after about 3 hours of driving we arrived in Mancara where we found a cashpoint that would accept our cards and a hotel (again about 3x the price of those in Ecuador) right on the beach. We went for a walk along the beach and watched crabs scuttling into their holes as we approached; huge waves crashed into the shore; lines of pelicans flew low over the water; frigate birds swooped over our heads on the wind; a huge fleet of fishing boats bobbed our at sea and then the sun dipped down behind a cliff at the end of the beach casting a red light over the whole scene - beautiful.