Made it to Peru
We left the lovely Loja, but the pretty horrible if cheap "Hotel International" at 7:00 on Wednesday morning, headed to Piura in the north of Peru. I thought that for once we would wake our neighbors up instead of them waking us up. Hah! They got up at 4:30, while we only really got up and out of bed at 6:00. We were looking at an 8 hour bus ride. It really took more like 9 because of the unknown delays.... There were two MASSIVE landslides in the Andean mountain road. Luckily, by the time we arrived, the bulldozers were already in full swing and we didn´t have to wait that long to drive over the scarriest part of our trip so far. They didn´t clear the landslides completely off the road as they were too big. However, they did make little hills we were able to drive over. The thing about this is that the slide is still there and if you looked down on the right window you were looking down a scary ass fall down the mountain. kragen, rightly so, was more worried about what could fall on us from above, but I was more terrified about falling down the mountain. However, we made it across without much incident. We did puncture the right front tire, but that hole was plugged up with some sort of glue and a rag (I think) and we were on our merry way again.
I met a nice woman, Gina, from the Bay Area who is travelling by herself for about six months before she goes back to her love in Sacramento & settles down. She´s a doula and a bay area (Marin even) native. She´s been blogging about her trip.
There was flaky open wifi in our room in Piura and in Trujillo, that came in from somewhere nearby and so we connected as we could. Sometimes that meant standing on the bed and holding the laptop up. It´s pretty slow, but it´s something. Anything for a fix, right? We´re now in a much nicer, quieter, hotel in Trujillo. It´s actually a hotel and not a hostal and the "nicest" place we´ve stayed throughout our whole trip. I needed this. I needed a shower that wouldn´t shock you with the electrical water heater in the showerhead, a room that I don´t need earplugs to sleep in, and a place that I can really relax in. Really, it didn´t cost that much (74 solles (divide by 3 to get $)), but man what a difference.
Most of our friends are at Burning Man this week and we have been revisiting our photos from 2004 & 2005. I hope everyone is having fun and not having too bad of a meltdown. I have one every year I go. =) We also missed the bab5 10 year anniversary party which seemed like a smashing success. Very sorry not to have been there, but I am looking forward to seeing folks when we are back in mid-late September for 2 weeks. We fly out of LAX on September 28 to Venezuela. We bought one-way tickets, a very scary prospect for me. I really hope that people come & visit us when we settle down - where ever that ends up being. I don´t want to loose touch & the prospect of being gone for so long freaks me out. Mainly, I just miss people, my friends and family & yet my home is where ever kragen is. He´s my family now.
We are planning on leaving Trujillo on Saturday and taking yet another 8 hour bus ride, but this time to Lima, where we will stay for about a week. Yesterday´s 8 hour bus ride was uneventful, but man, what strange countryside, not really what I thought of when I think of South America. We went through the desert. Really, it was like the Sahara or the Australian outback. It was amazing and there really was nothing, but the PanAmerican Highway going through it. The water table seemed to be fairly high. kragen noticed that it was only about 5 feet below the sand because when the earth dipped a little bit, there would be waterholes, that seemed to be pretty salty. Occassionally there would be cities where there was water, but mainly it was just sand, sand, and more sand.