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Everyone says, Busing in South America is an experience - they weren't wrong! We had to catch three different buses from Cuenca to get to Lima (change in Huaquillas (Ec) and Piura (Pe)) and the total trip ended up taking up 29 hours! It was, crazy to say the least.
I love busing Ecuadorian style, it certainly is nothing fancy, often cramped and sometimes a bit warm, the roads are also rather bumpy but the tunes are generally pumping and I also love how random people just jump on every now and then and try and sell you a random array of food and drinks ... I've never brought anything but it all certainly looks interesting!
Crossing the border on an Ecuadorian bus was interesting and, time consuming (2 hours all up). There also seemed to be a whole town in between offically leaving Ecuador and officially arriving in Peru and the security seemed pretty overly relaxed - it seemed like going in between Ecuador and Peru at this point, would be pretty darn easy!
On the bus from Huaquillas to Piura, I somehow managed to get myself trapped in the bus toilet! When I realised I couldn't open the door I knocked... the three Columbian guys sitting outside the door heard and realised I couldn't get out, because the bus was so old and rubbish anyway! They started telling me what to do in Spanish....the start of about fifteen minutes of this hilarity ... all whilst driving along a really bumpy road, getting warmer and warmer trapped in a plane sized toilet room with a non-flushable toilet. Finally, after ramming their pocket flip knife through the lock and having no luck, another guy came down and decided a screw-driver was the way to go, he rammed this right through the door - I was actually trying to look through the wee hole at the time so it gave me a huge fright. But he just popped the whole door and lock and - I was out! Unfortunately, all the commotion had meant that the entire bus was now watching - I received a rather loud cheer - it was somewhat embarrassing! To make it worse, two minutes later....we pulled in to a service stop with an actual toilet.
Piura was a bit interesting, we arrived late ... maybe around 8ish and were immediately hassled by numerous taxi drivers, we took one that looked official enough. We ended up driving around three different bus terminals to try find one that still had a bus that night to Lima ... the driving was crazy - I was pretty convinced we didn't need to worry about whether we missed all the buses and had no accommodation - cause we were probably gonna die due to some crazy Peruvian driving anyway. But, we made it! And, we had the most fancy nice bus all the way over night to Lima, the chairs fully reclined, we got given dinner and breakfast, there were even movies and the bus even had wifi!
There was some incredible landscapes across our entire trip ... unfortunately my camera is majorly playing up so pictures are non-existent. Driving down out of the Andes from Cuenca was really amazing, kind of reminded me of parts of New Zealand, except on a much larger scale - lush and mountainous and I loved seeing all the people dressed more traditionally farming etc. We also passed through more rocky mountainous terrain, we also passed through more a rainforesty type area, banana plantations ... and then Peru is like a desert. Although, we did see some rice paddies! But mainly Peru was miles and miles of epic sand dunes - really quite amazing.
After 29 hours travel, Cintia and Martias were waiting for us at the bus terminal in Lima! It was really nice to arrive in to such a big city to some friendly faces who then took us from the bus terminal to their lovely apartment to chill out. They live in Miraflores, which is one of the nicer parts of Lima, we took a walk along the coast in the afternoon and you can really tell. Dylan and Julie arrived the next morning so we saved the city tour until we did it with them.
It's hard to know what to say about Lima, it was great having some people who have been living there to really show us the sights but still, it's kind of a thrown together city. The centre is really nice, again colonial style with some nice parks and gorgeous buildings and stunning churches - one of which was mid-through a service which we crept in to the back of during the singing I had a sit down and it was incredible, very powerful - it was all in Spanish and very traditionally Catholic. We also went down in to some catacones at another monastery. These were amazing, and really - quite creepy. I have never seen so many bones in my life. A while ago, all the skeltunes were dug up in order to count how many people were buried there so the bones are now arranged according to type - for aesthetic purposes - creepy.
Our last night in Lima we went out for a great meal on near the waterfront and a casual beer at one of the quieter bars we could find, it looked like there could've been some pretty fun night life but we were all pretty shattered! We said goodbye to Cintia, Martias, Dylan and Julie and met the couple of others of on tour -they seem quite nice, it is a very small tour group though!
Tomorrow - the tour begins - on to Pisco mmm.
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