Adventures in Transport

On Tuesday, I left dear Ecuador for the unknown territory of northern Perú. I am not kidding about northern Perú being a bit clandestine. Only one percent of all tourists who fly into Lima go north instead of south.

Before I arrived, I expected Ecuador and Perú to be similar. They are neighbors and, were both inhabited by the Inca. I was shocked when I walked across the bridge at the border and discovered a completely different accent, idiomatic vocabulary, and pace of life. Total culture shock!

After I crossed the bridge, I was allowed to reboard the bus (for the record, I was on a bus from Loja, Ecuador to Piura, Perú). We had only been on the road for twenty minutes when we were stopped at a police checkpoint (one of three that we would encounter while leaving the border). At one checkpoint, the officer interrogated me for five minutes because he thought that I was an Ecuadorian travelling on a fake U.S. passport. He tried very hard to trick me into admitting my ''true'' nationality.

I finally arrived in Piura at 4:30 PM (the bus ride lasted ten hours). However, I did not get to enjoy the town because I had to transfer to a 6:00 PM bus to Chiclayo. I finally got to go to bed at 10:00 PM.


When I woke up the next morning, I discovered one sign of northern Perú's underdeveloped tourism industry: convoluted public transportation. Basically, the entire city of Chiclayo gets around in combinas, cars that are as small as mini vans or as large as VW busses. When a Chiclayoan wants to go somewhere, they flag down a combina with a sign for their destination or they go to the correct station (for the record, all of the stations are located in different corners of the city and have no infrastructure). You wind up with vans packed like clown cars travelling to neighboring towns.

I used the combinas to go to archaeological sites for two days. Then, it was time to move on. Last night, I boarded a 7:00 PM bus to Chachapoyas. What was supposed to be an eight-hour ride morphed into a fifteen-hour test of road block endurance. At midnight, we rolled to the stop on a windy road in the middle of the Andes. A group of local workers had shut down the highway to protest their meager wages. They only earned five soles per day (in other words, they had to clothe, shelter, and feed their entire families with fewer than two dollars every day). They threatened to keep us immobile for twenty four hours, but finally let us move on at 3:30 AM. As the bus sped up, I finally fell asleep. I had had trouble earlier because all of the men sitting around me had been snoring. Three hours later, we neared Chachapoyas and discovered another paro. The highway was closed until 7:00 PM for road repairs. A group of Spanish exchange students could not stand the wait. They staged a riot in front of the road blockade. Finally, the police agreed to let us pass. I arrived in Chachapoyas at 10:00 AM, feeling exhausted.