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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We arrived at Guayaquil about 5:30am and were on our way again on a 6am bus to Quito. By late afternoon we were in Quito. Daniel had told me to send him a text when I arrived, which I did, but he wasn't responding. Great! I didn't know him that well, I supposed, but I didn't think he was that unreliable. Instead I took a taxi to the hostel the Canadian girl (yes, whose name I've forgotten) was staying in, reasoning that I could just stay there if it Daniel's place fell through completely. On the way I got a text from Daniel asking if I had arrived yet and realised that I hadn't received any delivery reports for the texts I had sent him. It costs far too much money to make even a short phone call from my UK mobile, so I went to an internet cafe while the Canadian was checking in, and sent Daniel a Facebook message, got a response, and managed to arrange that he would meet me at the hostel. After a drink, waiting with the Canadian for Daniel, she said that she was going to the internet too, but she'd be back soon because she wasn't "some major internet geek or anything". Daniel arrived soon after, with his wife and Chris, a friend of theirs. We had a drink and waited over an hour for the Canadian to return, but in the end I just left my email address at reception in case she wanted to go for a drink in Cartagena, and we left. Not some major internet geek, my arse!

Daniel and I went for a couple of drinks and the other two left. Ecuador does not seem to be cheap, despite both guide books having claimed it was the cheapest place after Bolivia on the continent. Quito was pleasantly cool after the jungle thanks to its altitude, despite being almost on the equator, and it seemed to have a good night life. Daniel, though, was ill, and though he was trying to put a brave face on it, clearly would rather have been in bed than in a pub. After Bolivia and Peru it was clear the ethnic mix in Ecuador was much more diverse, in fact I think it was more diverse than any country we went to in South America (with the exception, of course, of Brazil which we didn't see any of apart from Iguazu Falls). For the first time in my South America, there were significant numbers of black people, and there were lots of people of European origin again. I like seeing a lot of mixing, and what always seems nice in South America is that there appears to be very little racism, no matter what the mix; it's not like everywhere, I believe, in Asia, where "white skin in more beautiful" and all of the beauty products have skin lighteners: they don't exist in South America. This was definitely a pleasant surprise about South America: considering how much US culture they seem to have absorbed, I had expected the continent to be much more racist, but I think it's less racist than Europe.

Quito

Quito

Looking at the remainder of my journey to Cartagena more closely, I asked Joanne in a text to look for cheap flights within Colombia, which I had heard exist. She found a flight from Cali to Cartagena for only £78, which was definitely worth it, but I couldn't decide which day to leave; it depended on when the buses would get me into Cali. Instead of going directly to the bus company we knew could give us information, Daniel took me on a tour of agencies that only sold flights and knew nothing about buses, I think to save us the five-minute bus journey. When we finally got to the company we discovered that I wouldn't have time to see the old town and send my fax before catching the bus in time to fly the following day. I sent Joanne another text asking her to book the flight on the day after next, but the cheap flights had already sold out, leaving only the £142 flights, which didn't seem as obviously worth it at all. I was so annoyed: I hate these sneaky cheap flight websites! They always know when you are about to make your mind up and the fare you've been looking at for days disappears. There was still a cheap flight for the next day, but it would be a rush to catch it, I wouldn't see the old town, and my overdue fax would be delayed even more.

Quito

Quito

Quito old town

Quito

I cracked and decided just to splash out on the expensive flight, as a Christmas present to myself. Then I instantly regretted spending the money and I was in such a mood that I couldn't enjoy the old town anyway, when we went there. It just looked another boilerplate South American town. How many of these towns have I seen? One would have been enough: Buenos Aires and you don't need to see another town in South America, except maybe Colonia del Sacramento, which is a bit different from the standard model. A main square. A cathedral. Yawn. Even the local speciality desert, tres leches, did not cheer me up. Then back at Daniel's flat, Chris hogged Daniel's PC, so I didn't have time to write the letter I needed to fax and it was all a big waste of time spending the extra money and staying the extra night. I was in such a foul mood that I decided I must have had enough of travelling for me to over-react so much, and I should go home as soon as possible.

Quito main square

Quito main square

Quito main square

A really ugly building on Quito main square

Daniel in Quito main square

Tres leches

Next morning I got up early for the 7am bus to the border. This meant I would have loads of time hanging around, but I was feeling so defeated when I bought the ticket that I couldn't be bothered going to the extra effort required to leave at a different time: it would have meant going to the main bus station and back, just to buy it, then going there again when I wanted to leave. I couldn't be bothered. I just wanted to be home with my wife!

Once on the bus, I started to cheer up again: I was soon going to be in Colombia! Everyone I had met on the trip who had been to Colombia had loved it, so I was really looking forward to it.

written by  The Happy Couple on December 21, 2009 from Quito, Ecuador
from the travel blog: Michael's Lonely post-Honeymoon
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I had changed enough of my "Ecuadorian" US Dollars at the border to pay for a collectivo to the town of Ipiales which is the first settlement after the border. Here I reckoned I could draw money from an ATM and pay for my bus Cali. Unfortunately, the border had taken so long that the day time buses had all departed, which meant I would have to get an overnight bus and waste the money already paid to reserve a room in a Cali hostel. I needed lunch after all that travelling, so I asked for salchipapas at a cafe in the bus station, because I had seen it everywhere in northern Peru and Ecuador and not tried it. I assumed it would be spicy sausage like salchicha and insisted I defintely wanted it when the girl behind the counter said it would take ten minutes. Meanwhile I went out to ask more companies about transport to Cali. I found one desk where they were selling minibus tickets, leaving at 4pm, which was twenty minutes time, but it wasn't supposed to be arriving until 4am. I couldn't understand this because the guide book said Cali was eight to ten hours from Ipiales by bus, so I asked the man why it wasn't arriving at 1am or 2am. He said that yes, it was possible we would arrive then, but he doesn't want to tell me that time, when there is also a chance we won't arrive until 4am; he didn't want to lie to me and make me angry, he said. What?! After Peru I couldn't believe what I was hearing. So I bought a ticket and rushed back to the cafe to eat my salchipapas, which was disgusting: the sausage was hotdog and the chips weren't even nice, but I didn't care because it was cheap and I was starving.

Salchipapas

I rushed to the bus and I was off again. So much travel, and this time so little space: a man and his small son were both sitting in the seat next to me.

written by  The Happy Couple on December 22, 2009 from Ipiales, Colombia
from the travel blog: Michael's Lonely post-Honeymoon
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Despite the cramped conditions, I managed to get some sleep after a couple of Colombian beers with my food, but I woke late at night and saw people frowning and looking under the minibus. We had stopped at another roadside cafe place, but we had stopped for repairs not for food this time. Outside the cafe there was a table with some people I recognised from my bus, already quite full of empty beer bottles, so I got off and joined them. The Spanish was getting harder to understand again but, despite my inability to communicate more than the basics, everyone was very friendly, and we sat around drinking and laughing for more than an hour while they worked on the bus. When it was time to leave I tried to pay for the four beers I had drunk, but the waitress said that I only needed to pay for the one I had asked for, because the rest had already been paid for. Apparently the guys who had been collecting handfuls of beer and handing them around had paid for them all. Amazing! In Peru, the asusmption was always that the gringo would pay, and now in Colombia, they hadn't even asked me to pay for my own.

Strange corn and egg snack with beer

I had been in Colombia for less than a day and already I could see why people liked it: the people are very friendly and sociable, they don't seem to treat you differently because you are a tourist, and another thing I noticed is that everyone seems to start speaking using the familiar form of the verb, which I think seems more friendly rather than rude, which I suppose is the argument against it. I don't think I've yet heard anyone using usted in Colombia. And where there had been a broader ethnic mix in Ecuador than the Southern Cone, the Bell Curve seemed even wider in Colombia: it really is a "rainbow nation".

Posh Colombian beer

Back on the road, I finally listened to the last "unlistened" track on my mp3 player. Eight GB really is a lot of data: it took more than one year of travelling to listen to everything once. OK obviously I listened to some things more than once, but for the last several months I had only been listening to the "songs not yet heard" playlist.

At 4am, almost to the second, we arrived in Cali, just as the ticket salesman had predicted. I suppose they must have breakdowns so often that they feel they have to factor them into the schedules; in Peru, of course, the schedule assumes that there are no breakdowns, there are no other vehicles on the road, the engine is at peak performance, there is no extra weight from passengers, and there is a 100 mph tailwind the whole way. Despite the email I had asked in a text for Joanne to send, the hostel was all locked up when I got there at 4:30am. But after some persistent knocking a woman came to the door and let me in.

Joanne had booked me a dorm bed, because a private room was much dearer, but the dorm was really only a triple room and it had nobody else in it. Nice.

Since Joanne isn't here to photo the grafitti

Grafitti

In the morning I discovered there were only two other people staying in the hostel, which was more like a nice big house. I tried to have a conversation in Spanish with one of the other guests, until he eventually asked me if I spoke English. He was Israeli, and he seemed perplexed that I hadn't spoken English to him straight away. "Why were you trying to speak Spanish to me?" he asked. Sure, if I'd known he was Israeli I'd have spoken English to him, but how was I supposed know where he was from? I was just following almost everyone else's good example of at least starting in Spanish in a Spanish speaking country on a predominantly Spanish speaking continent.

Crumbly house across the road from hostel

Hostel

The woman who ran the hostel was very friendly and seemed surprised that I was leaving Cali so soon, when the Cali Festival was about to start. She told me it's a beautiful place, particularly during the festival, but I didn't have time to see much of Cali at all: I just had time to find a place where I could finally send an international fax, hopefully securing me enough money from the bank so that I wouldn't have to beg to save up for my flight home.

Hostel

On hostel wall

Hostel

Hostel living room

My mum has this same clock

Another Colombian beer

Hostel

Then it was a bus to the airport for my expensive flight to Cartagena, via Medellin. I was really looking forward to the flight after so much bus travel. There was a time earlier in the trip when I didn't ever want to get on a plane again, but the South American buses had cured me of that. I was a bit shocked when I saw the plane though: it was barely bigger than the light aircraft we had our tour of the Nazca Lines in. OK, it was bigger, but it was only four seats across, and it didn't even have proper engines: it was just a prop-jet! I started wondering what Colombian air safety statistics were like.

After only a 45 minute flight we landed at Medellin, where I hoped we would be changing to a bigger plane but, despite making me get off and go through the transfers process, I returned to the same plane and a stewardess laughed when she saw me getting back on the plane for some reason. Perhaps it was because I had drawn attention to myself by asking if they had any alcoholic drinks on board (they didn't, and there was no meal or snack privided either).

Another hour-and-a-bit later and we landed in Cartagena. Finally! After one week of travelling almost non-stop from Lagunas in the jungle of Peru, with most of those nights sleeping on transport, I was finally at my destination and I had made it to my friends in time for Christmas.

written by  The Happy Couple on December 23, 2009 from Cali, Colombia
from the travel blog: Michael's Lonely post-Honeymoon
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View from apartment at night

Cartagena, I noticed quite quickly, is hot and humid. It felt more or less the same as the jungle climate I had left behind a week previously. Unfortunately, my phone, which had begun working properly again after I left the jungle, also soon noticed that the climate was like the jungle and started overheating and losing power really quickly again. Since then my phone has been nearly useless, which means I've not been able to use it to keep track of what I'm doing or take blog notes, so I'll probably miss lots of details out from now on, which surely can't be a bad thing?

Zdenek offered to take me for a quick walk around the old town to introduce me to the place, but it was only brief taxi journey there to walk around, and we didn't even stop anywhere for a drink. Already, though, I was noticing that most of the people in Cartagena seemed to be very well turned out and it was full of large expensive cars. I was beginning to suspect we had come to a rich people's playground for Christmas.

The beach across the road

View by day

The following day, Christmas Eve, we visited the supermarket and bought just about everything in the shop. We went a bit crazy but we were all keen to capture as much of the magic of Christmas so far away from home and our loved ones, so we made sure we had fizzy wine and plenty of other booze, but also blue cheese, which isn't very common in South America, nuts, some cake, little sausages to wrap in bacon, and all the other Christmas essentials. We did at least draw the line at the massive turkeys they had, settling instead for a large chicken. It was clear that the two Swedes had different ideas about how to run Christmas, though, and they preferred to keep their shopping separate. We were spending a lot but, I told myself again, it was Christmas, wasn't it?

Parrillada

That night we went out for dinner at a parrillada in the local area. The prices were a bit high but, I told myself, it was Christmas. The Swedish boys wouldn't cave, though, and got their food from MacDonald's or some other take-away; Andrew was actually starting to sound like he had some sort of eating disorder because he only seemed happy to eat a very limited range of food and what they had on offer here, bits of cooked animal, was just too "yucky" for him, since he seems to only like it minced up into burgers and sausages. In fact, when my full parrillada arrived I too briefly had second thoughts: not only was it huge, but it included some long wiggly thing that looked suspiciously like it might be intestines; I remembered that the fact a parrillada always seems to include intestines is the main reason I had not so far ordered it, despite being surrounded by suitable places in Argentina, and frequently since. I thought I might as well try it since it was sitting in front of me and I was surprised to discover it wasn't too bad, at least nothing like as bad as tripe usually is, but maybe that's because tripe isn't usually barbecued until crispy, so that it becomes reminiscent of crackling.

The counter just needed a prop to go on it

Genuine I think and much cheaper than UK

On Christmas morning I got up quite early so that I could take my laptop to the MacDonald's where there was wifi for me to Skype Joanne and my mum. I was a bit too keen and the manager seemed not to have turned up on time with the keys because lots of staff were sitting around outside waiting. While I was waiting someone offered to sell me some Cuban cigars, which he claimed were on promoción. They seemed quite cheap and he happily lowered the price by half in response to some mild haggling, making me thing I should have aimed lower, but it was Christmas after all. I returned to the flat for breakfast and Buck's Fizz. We had decided to use the cheapest bottle of fizz for this, which was Colombian, but it really was terrible; even with the orange juice it was still pretty horrible, although the orange juice itself was also disgusting, in fact I think it might have been the biggest problem: the carton proudly proclaimed it to be lactose-free, which you would have thought went without saying on orange juice, until you remember the strange South American habit of adding water or milk to fruit juice - and always sugar, of course, because fruits just aren't sweet enough are they? Well, in this case, they had helpfully substituted the absolutely necessary milk with... soya milk! Yum yum, and now we had it in our very bad Colombian sparkling wine; I drank most of everyone else's as well as my own.

Natasha opens the first fizz

The girls sit down to a bucks fizz breakfast

After breakfast, I finally got into MacDonald's, ordered a coffee, and proceeded to call my loved ones using Skype. The place was jam-packed with noisy hyper-active spoiled little brats and their bored-looking parents, who seemed totally unwilling to control their progeny. At least I was able to download a Christmas album as a surprise for Lucy, who had complained that Christmas music was the one thing missing, and it wouldn't be Christmas without it. The conversations were a bit frustrating with all the noise, but it was just about enough to make up for not being there.

Prawn cocktail and avocado to start

Xmas dinner nearly assembled

When we were nearing the end of our conversation I got a text from Lucy, as my phone hadn't quite run down yet, telling me that food was nearly ready. The girls had done all of the preparation work, so I was glad to be able to complete the experience by putting on The Best Christmas Album In The World Ever with aplomb. The girls had done a great job and we tucked into huge amounts of food and booze, including some much nicer sparkling wine, not from Colombia, all accompanied by cheesy Christmas classics and a couple of Cuban cigars, until, near the end of CD2 my laptop screen suddenly went blank and the music was also frozen on one particular note. When I rebooted the machine it wasn't working; the thing would go on, but Windows didn't get very far into the boot-up process. Not more hassle! Was this the effect of humidity as well? What about my photos and my blogs, and using it for wifi? Someone sensibly advised me to forget about it until the next day.

Lucy carves as Zdenek poses

Not bad for being so far from home

Xmas dinner hits the spot

So apart from the laptop it was a very lovely and successful Christmas day. Unfortunately the next day we had to move out of the apartment because the price was nearly doubling in preparation for the New Year period. Amazingly, Lucy and Zdenek had got up earlier than me on Christmas morning and had found us a new place to move to on Boxing Day.

Everyone but me

Still there after plenty of rum and beer

Cake at last