Conchas Negras

Finally we arrived at Chiclayo about 10am, where I expected someone to point me at the Piura bus. Instead, the driver waved someone over, who was standing around the bus station, gave him S20 and said something to him. The man picked up my big rucksack without saying a word to me and started walking. I thought he must be taking me to the bus and the S20 was another matter entirely, but we walked right out of the bus station, at which point I realised we must have missed the bus, and instead I was being put in a taxi, after all S20 was too much for a bus to Piura, but we didn't walk to a taxi either. In fact we walked a couple of blocks down the road to a different bus station, where the man indicated I should wait with my bag while he stood in the ticket queue! When he got to the front, he waved me over so I could give my passport details then disappeared, leaving me confused and grasping my ticket.

I looked at the ticket and it said Sabado 11am. I couldn't believe it - they had screwed me over yet again! Now I was going to have to find a hotel in this town, which looked horrible from what I had seen, and fall a day behind, not to mention the extra expense and the fact I had been hoping to do some administration in a big town like Piura I probably wouldn't be able to do here! I was livid and I wasn't going to take it any more, so I marched up to the desk, ignoring the entire queue, and told her that I wanted to go hoy. She frowned then smiled. She pointed at the ticket and said Sabado gently, then diez y nueve, then once. It started to dawn on me and I asked ¿que hora es ahora? It was 10:40am and the bus was leaving in twenty minutes. The confusion when I arrived, the lack of sleep, the disorientaton caused by constantly arriving later than expected, and the fact it was very overcast, had all conspired to convince me that it was early evening. I was clearly moving too fast, but I still had plenty of ground to cover. I was going to be a real mess by the time I got to Cartagena.

The bus to Piura was a big improvement and we finally arrived about 2:30pm, just shy of 24 hours after I left Tarapoto and seven-and-a-half hours after the told me I would arrive. I had been planning to stay one night in Piura and deal with all the administration that was becoming increasingly urgent, but I had now lost almost a whole day since leaving the jungle. Daniel had sent me an email saying that he would be home by Thursday and I was welcome to stay at his place in Quito if I wanted to. I hadn't really planned to stop off in Quito, but it now seem like a great idea, and surely Quito was big enough to be able to send a fax? When I asked what buses were available into Ecuador, there was only one option: Guayaquil which my guidebook told me is the biggest city in Ecuador and not on the direct route through Ecuador I was planning to take. No matter: there would be plenty of buses to Quito from there I was promised. I booked it and went looking for my last cebiche before leaving Peru. I found a place where they were selling cebiche de conchas negras which I remembered some Peruvian raving about earlier in the trip. It was raw shellfish again, of course, but I had to try it and ordered one of the cebiche mixto dishes that included them. The cebiche was excellent, but I can't honestly say that the conchas negras were that special: all they did was make a purplish stain on my light-coloured shorts when I picked a shell up, spilling the juice.

Cebiche de conchas negras

Cebiche eaten I was now ready to leave Peru. The bus left at 6:30pm and I had paid for the good seats since I was so exhausted and they didn't actually cost much more than the cheaper ones. As we headed towards the border, I tallied up the time and realised that I had been in Peru substantially longer than any other country in the trip, which I thought was odd because, although it is a big country, I didn't feel like I had done that much, and I hadn't loved it the same way I had Nepal or Laos. But it did have Machu Picchu and the jungle which, though I was glad to leave by the end, I was very happy to have done because it made such a change after everything else we had done in South America. And, yes, it was more touristy, there was more English spoken (except in the jungle), and the locals seemed more gringo cynical than the South American countries we went to before Peru. And my biggest regret: I hadn't seen the mountains! The highest moutain range outside the Himalayas and I had passed it by, or at least missed it out because of bad weather and pressure to continue onwards.

Oh well, at least I had given Peru a fair chance, not like Ecuador which I was going to zip through in a couple of days, abandoning all the plans I had sketched out when finding out about Ecuador from Daniel and Nigel: treks up volcanos, surfing at the beach, treks in the mountains, and the jungle, which had been rendered obsolete by my visit to the Peruvian jungle.

written by  The Happy Couple on December 19, 2009 from Piura, Peru
from the travel blog: Michael's Lonely post-Honeymoon
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