Cuenca To Peru

We left our rental apartment at 6:20 in the morning on Thursday July 11th just as the night sky was turning a full rich deep blue over the city of Cuenca in Southern Ecuador. By the time we reached the Peruvian border four (optimistic) hours away GANNET2 would have covered 99,000 miles since 2020. 

The road from Cuenca to Huaquillas was a nightmare, a final kiss goodbye from the department of road maintenance in Ecuador.

Dawn gave way to fog which prompted no Ecuadorean driver to turn on their headlights. I watched eager road martyrs launch themselves into death defying acts  of stupidity anxious to pass slow trucks in the fog on corners and with no lights on. We saw no accidents.

The southern part of Ecuador turns to mountain deserts arid and brown and treeless and endless. The road does not handle these mountains well. Rainy season floods have turned every culvert into a slide and every cliff into a potential road block as it slips over the roadway. 

The good bits are really good, beautiful scenery and a winding ribbon of asphalt showing off beautiful Ecuador at its best. 

The bad bits are awful bringing out my inner and not too suppressed angry gringo. What made it worse was the total absence of road crews or repairs in progress or even road signs and warnings. 

Clearly we weren’t getting to the border at 10:30 as Google Maps originally promised when we left Cuenca. 

At one point our metal shelving on the toilet door fell down with an almighty crash. We stopped to put away in a bag the powders potions and shampoos that we store on the door and figured we would deal with it later. We talked as we drove and decided on a course of action to get it back in place on the door. We forgot to photograph the fiasco as it was in progress but here is Layne reloading the baskets after we repaired the problem. We are also going to put a lot less weight in it after that mess. 

And to focus down a little more on a bad day in progress  we had a Laurel and Hardy moment as we were rehanging the basket and trying to locate it properly on the toilet door. To our horror the door would no longer open.  

“Do you need to go to the toilet?” I asked Layne as I struggled with the baffling problem. “Not right now she said with only a little anxiety in her voice. I had a few minutes to think and not panic. 

There we were in the southern deserts of Ecuador with no toilet and no idea why. I got a blade after some frantic glaring at the stuck door and managed to unlatch the thing. The basket had slid too far over blocking the handle. Crisis averted. We drove on at last. 

After all that the road was still terrible. 

The bright sunlight produces deep shadows and you can’t see what’s ahead, in this case plowed up dirt and rocks. Driving fast is an invitation to wreck your home. 

Layne spotted a little store in one village and when she noticed the five gallon jugs of water we stopped, pulled a u-turn much to the shopkeepers amazement and asked to buy three jugs of water. The amazement didn’t stop there because I threw open the back doors and, like the Tardis I revealed a suburban home inside the van complete with a dog snoozing on his bed at the back. The villagers rallied from their shock and helped siphon fifteen gallons to fill our 30 gallon tank. 

The road just wouldn’t stop and it started to feel like we were standing still. 

It felt less like the PanAmerican Highway and more like the Khyber Pass or the Wakhan Valley in Central Asia, places I would love to drive one day. 

Meanwhile this chaos had to do. 

When we weren’t studying the potholes and subsidence and ragged torn up roadway the scenery was awe inspiring. 

Narrow road ahead, between rock slides. 

Aboard GANNET2 the struggle to fix the toilet door was very real. And there was no help at hand. 

We did eventually reach the flatlands of the coast in time for lunch and a fiasco at the border. That story tomorrow as we lounge on our favorite Peruvian beach.

Swiss Wassi

I am sitting in a bamboo beach chair overlooking the Pacific Ocean.

But I am not alone. He loves it here. 

Mati and Sammy left early this morning while Layne and I were sleeping off our border crossing stress from yesterday and our Brazilian neighbors are nowhere to be seen while their Transit van is closed up.  Layne is aboard GANNET2 making herself some cereal while I am out here supposedly writing a blog entry.

Mati described the sea air in liquid terms after weeks of living at high altitude in the rarefied air above ten thousand feet and she’s not wrong. Layne’s persistent cough and hoarse voice have disappeared and lassitude is the order of the day.

I think I’ll save the story of our last drive through Ecuador and our border crossing for tomorrow as today looks to be a swimming day, a lounging day and a day to figure out European style 220 volt shorepower. We are no longer in the familiar.

The drive from the border was dusty and messy and filled with motorcycles adapted to three wheelers as taxis and pickups and general purpose transport all at 35 miles per hour.

We sashayed among them like Cleopatra’s barge among minnows bouncing over speed bumps and trying to find a traffic lane on a road with markings but full of potholes. Layne started laughing as I started swearing.

She said something about me losing my shit after twenty miles when the country is only 1600 miles long. Supportive to a fault

We pulled up at the gate to Swiss Wassi (“Wassi” means home in Quechua) and the manager game to the door and asked us if we wanted come in. As though we had stopped our campervan there just to admire the view. We had no idea how good it was going to be once we got to the inside of the forbidding gates.

It’s eleven dollars a night plus a couple of bucks to use the kitchen and a couple more if you want to use the pool. The fridge is full of cold beer and Rusty is taking no guff from the campground’s barky hairless Peruvian dog who is I think  quite sweet but looks like a black shiny nightmare on legs poor thing.

Mati and Sammy showing us how you do Peru:

The English overlanders are gone now to an Irish pub in Lima to see England kill Spain in the cup final on Sunday afternoon. I don’t envy them two days to drive 800 miles but their journey is ending and they have sold their van (online - Oh brave new world) to a Dutch couple who will use it with its Chilean plates to tour South America in turn. Now we have to ship GANNET2 to Europe as we have people to see in Cornwall. 

Dinner was falafel and conversation while watching the sun go down and then bed and sleep for dessert.

Layne is working out our route across Peru, a mixture of coast and mountain with cities and sacred valleys and a visit to Machu Picchu perforce in the mix. Bolivia may not be on our route depending on how they are behaving when we get there but if not the reward is Chile, a country of decent roads, order and high prices. So much to anticipate. 

For now we swim. Our happy place.