Monday- Wednesday March 10th-12 Quito
We spent the night in Chachapoyas in a hotel named Las Orquidias, or the Orchids, suitably named after seeing one of the most varied and colorful display of Orchids in Kuelap that morning. Tired, sore, and road ragged, we decided to stop in Chachapoyas for the night (Thursday). We would thus begin our journey the next morning, possibly finding a bus to Jaen, the first stop we would need to make to get back to home sweet Ecuador. Rising to the familiar small town sound of roosters Friday morning, we dropped by the hostel office and talked to the friendly, yet freakishly tall 6 foot Peruvian owner about the best way to go about making our way north to Ecuador from Chachapoyas that day. To our surprise and luck, this burly bald yet amiable local had done the exact same trek into Ecuador through the least used border crossing of Peru. He proceeded to pull out a dry erase board a draw out a map with destinations, times, and prices to reach Ecuador, this was in fact the first dry erase board I had seen in south america, ever. See picture below.
"How to get to Ecuador from Peru" by: friendly hostel owner
Unfortunately, the first thing he explained to us was that it was going to be impossible to leave that day, Impossible? Nothing is ever impossible in South America? But he was right because as he explained, the only road out of town to the north was closed each and every day from 6 in the morning until 10 at night for road construction! It had been like this for a year, and was scheduled to be like this for a year more... So our only option was to leave either late in the evening arriving into noteworthy dangerous Jaen in the middle of the night, or to get up before the sun rose. We elected for the safer morning route, and thus spent a whole day blogging, studying, eating, and generally resting for the first time since we left Lima a week prior. Chachapoyas, named for the same civilization that had lived in the Kuelap fortress, is a delightful city of probably 20,000 people with a temperate climate and seas of steep green hills that hem in a weathered mix of colonial and utilitarian architecture. One of the tourists who had picked us up from hitch hiking (after our car broke down) the day prior was a construction worker from Spain. If you think it is cheaper traveling on the dollar down here, imagine the Euro! We had a beer with him that evening, and realized it was the first time we had meet another gringo really since leaving Lima, and I would be lying if I didn't say it was tad bit refreshing.
After a full day of recuperating in Chachapoyas, and a pisco sour at a local establishment playing five bad 1980's music videos on repeat, we decided to call it a night. Waking up the next morning at 3:30 AM in complete darkness due to a city wide power outage, we loaded our packs and headed downstairs to catch a previously arranged 4:00 car ride to the town of Bagua Grande 3 hours away. Now the way that most of the long car rides work around here is that there is a fixed price (in this case 25 soles 8 USD per person) and the more people a driver can pack into a car, the more money he makes. Stewart and I, and another person from our hotel made 3, but that wasn't enough for this enterprising driver. So after we were loaded the car, he goes down the local taxi cab hang out, and picks up the drunkest (it is now 3:45 AM), dirtiest, foulest smelling excuse for a man that he can find, and throws him in the back next to me. For two hours we rode through bumpy dirt roads in the dark early morning hours along a road that was under construction. The construction, as I now came to understand, was because they had carved the road into the side of a mountain, but they had not removed all the rock and dirt that still hung over our heads as we barreled down the hill. All the while the people in the cab remained in a semi comatose sleep deprived state, apart from the odorous man next to me slurring out drunken obscenities at Stewart and I because we were not up to date with all of Peruvian current events. What does this man do for a living you might wonder? He was a surgeon... At least now I know where rock bottom lies if I ever get there in my future career endeavors.
6:00 AM we arrive in Pedro Ruiz still in darkness and change cabs for the remaining hour to Bagua Grande, happily loosing our overserved comrade. From here I will list out the times and places visited on our trek north with interesting tidbits:
7:00 AM Arrive in Bagua Grande, catch cab to transfer station for busses to Jaen.
8:00 AM Depart in packed car for Jaen, rolling through rice paddies, hotter temperatures, and rice paddies.
9:00 AM Arrive in Jaen, city of 100,000 and considered dangerous at night. Catch motorcycle taxi to place where cars leave for San Ignacio. Eat cup of red Jello from child street vendor for breakfast.
9:30 AM Depart Jaen for San Ignacio in car packed with people, still not having seen pavement since we left Trujillo the previous Sunday.
12:30PM Arrive in San Ignacio, getting hotter and thicker on our way down from altitude. Take another motor taxi to where cars leave for Las Balsas (different from Las Balsas crossed between Celendin and Leymebamba).
12:45PM Leave San Ignacio in shoddy car for Las Balsas down muddy horrible excuse for a road.
1:00PM Blow out tire on horrible muddy excuse for a road, Stewart and I get out and change tire with driver
3:00PM Arrive Las Balsas, now almost 12 hours after leaving Chachapoyas. This is the littlest used border crossing between all of Peru and Ecuador.
We arrived into Las Balsas, named so because of the balsa wood boats that were used to cross the river before they built a bridge. Rolling into this "international crossing" At once I knew we were in the hinterland, or boonies, yet again, for I could count the buildings on each side of the river with two hands. The most remarkable, and typical South American randomness about the border crossing itself, was that the horrible, single lane dirt road that lead up to the crossing was followed by a state of the art enormous bridge capable of supporting many many tons more that either dirt road was capable of doing. Painted no cross yellow lines, with white side markers and reflective flashers on perfect asphalt for 50 meters only highlighted the irony. There were no guards on either side, people walked freely back and forth, and long bamboo poles served as the only gate.
We walked into the Peruvian customs office/shack to get our passports stamped, and the customs officer dressed in a soccer jersey and umbros said they get about 30 to 40 people to cross the border each day, very few of whom are backpacking gringos.
Now finally reaching Ecuador, we crossed the bridge and walked up to the customs office only to be greeted by a closed sign and giant steel drop down doors. WHAT? The border closed? How could an international border crossing be closed at 3:30 in the afternoon? It didn't take long to figure out what was going on, because as we rounded the corner to the only store/restaurant in this one road town, there were all 6 employees of the customs office drinking beer. They told us that the customs office was closed on account of their need to drink beer at 3:30 in the afternoon while on the job, and to go back to Peru and come back in an hour. So Stewart and I went back to Peru, ate some lunch at the only place on this side of town, watched some direct TV in a restaurant with only 2 walls and dirt floor (S.A. randomness), and went back to Ecuador, where we ourselves stopped by at the cafe where the customs officers had been and got a beer. Stewart and I, beer in hand, walked over the customs office and got our passports stamped by another soccer jersey, umbro sporting customs official.
Chillaxin in Las Balsas, drinking a beer and waiting for the customs officials to open the office.
At 5:30 PM we caught the only means of transportation out of town: an open air, wooden slatted seated, 30 year old bus with what had to of been solid metal pipes for a suspension system. For 2 and half hours we climbed back out of the canyon along yet another horrible road. This time due a rigid suspension and rutted excuse for a road; Stewart, I, and our bags spent half the time in our seats and half the time shooting up or falling down in the immediate foot above said seats.
8:00PM Arrive in Zumbes, Ecuador. We ate dinner, watched part of Waterworld (best movie ever) in Spanish, flirted with local 5th year medical student at internet cafe.
10:45PM Leave from Zumbes, Ecuador for Loja, Ecuador along yet another really junky dirt road (no sleeping).
5:45AM Arrive in Loja, eat breakfast at all night diner, and buy ticket for Quito at 8:00AM. Now having passed the 24 hour traveling mark
8:00AM Leave from Loja and begin what was supposed to be a 14 hour bus ride to Quito.
10:45 AM Get the bus stuck, more like buried, in a pile of soft mud left over from a recent landside. Have to call bulldozer to come pull bus out of mud.
11:30AM After blocking up the only road north from Loja; we are back on the road.
2:00PM Pass Cuenca, Ecuador, 3rd largest city in Ecuador; see asphalt for the first time in over one week. Glorious, Glorious asphalt, oh how I love you.
3:30PM Blow out tire, stop thirty minutes to replace.
5:00PM We are the first vehicle to arrive on the scene of a small rockslide. Between us and the other side are several giant 6' wide 3' tall boulders. It is now getting dark, and raining (this is why I don't have any pictures) and the unfallen rock still hangs unnaturally on the ledge over our heads. The 20 or so Ecuadorian men on our bus, Stewart, and I spend one hour pushing this boulder 2 feet so that the bus can fit through between another boulder. By now there is a line of cars a mile long behind us, and the unfallen rocks stay unfallen.
6:30PM Back on the road
12:30AM Arrive in Quito!!! 44 1/2 hours after we began traveling. Eat Shwarma at Indian food place. Go to bed!
The "real equator"
This is where I have spent the past three days: catching up with friends, doing the things I forgot to do while I was here, taking a break from the road, and planning our next leg, Colombia! One of the things I never did was go to the Equator, or Mitad del Mundo, which you can see the pictures of down below. The giant monument was built by the Ecuadorian government to mark the spot where a French cartographer calculated the Equator to be in the late 18th century based upon star measurements and the like. When the GPS network was defogged in the mid 1990s, they proved the actual Equator to be 30 feet or so north of the French measurement, still pretty damn impressive if you ask me.
Giant Monument built by the Ecuadorian government, but 30' off of the actual equator.
We leave for Colombia tomorrow by plane at 7:00 AM, which is the only flight we are going to take in our journey. The plane ticket was bought two weeks ago when it looked like Colombia and Ecuador were going to go to war, and we had fears of kidnapping/hijacking and the like on the road. They are no longer going to be going to war. From Bogota we are catching a bus tomorrow to Medellin, once the capital of Pablo Escobar's cocaine empire, now one of the safest cities in Colombia.
Chao,
2 comments:
So, which Las Balsas did you enjoy more? I´m going to say the second.
Post a Comment