Oh! Vilcabamba! I love it! Feels just like a wee town back home- permanently warm Irish summer weather with an hour of torrential rain every day at 3pm to keep things nice and lush.
Nothing to do but saunter through the countryside and hike up the Andes or even better go horse riding! That´s what I did. Complete with hike to a waterfall and adventure river crossing. I loved my horse. A better driver than I so I just left him in charge. It was GREAT. My guide claimed his name was Julio Iglesias but I doubt that. He had no English but Gerald the Austrian had perfect Spanish and a genial demeanor so we had a great day. I accidentally agreed to go on a date with Julio that night on account of our respective lack of languages but I managed to orchestrate it that Gerald would be there too so it wasn´t a date in the end.
Met a great guy from Colorado called Ari who had been travelling for two years and saw no reason to stop now. He was working in the hostel but had just got a job in the next town in a posh hotel. GREAT stories about buying a car in Bolivia and having to bribe the chief of police among others in order to expedite the process. Then getting stuck in mud in the salt flats in Bolivia and thinking they were going to die there but they managed to rip the truck out of the mud and drive back to the last village all bloody and burned. Finally selling it illegally in Brazil, scratching off all of its ID numbers and removing the plates. He still has the plates. And getting caught in a massive storm in Patagonia with nothing but a hammock and bivvie. Great stories. We stayed up drinking far too late with some Argentineans and a French couple.
Went for stroll the next day, then caught the bud to Loja, not sure if I would be able to reach Peru as the landslides from all the rain had made the road impassible several times over the past few days. Got to try.
Got to Loja and bought my ticket. They seemed to think the road was ok. Ate dinner in a nearby hotel and left my phrasebook behind. My Spanish really has to improve now without my handy phrasebook crutch.
Climbed on crappy bus. It was jammers but we all had numbered seats and tickets. Nightmare moment as an enormous woman and THREE tiny children all sat beside me in the one seat. She had two kids on the ground at her feet and the baby on her lap. I jumped off the bus and had a hissy fit at the driver and bus boy both of whom did the "ignore the foreigner" trick until they realised I wasn´t going away so eventually the bus boy told me I could move. So I did and got a double seat to myself at the back of the bus beside the toilet which I thought would be a problem but in fact they locked the toilet anyway. Helpful as ever. Everything was fine after that, apart from the crappyness of the bus and the noise and the inability to go to the toilet, until the border crossing. Mosquito central. Literally millions of them attacked us as we queued for the series of border guards from Ecuador into Peru (funny how the five foreigners were the last ones in the queue). We got back on to the bus and took about a million mosquitoes with us. And a few extra customers. So I shared my double seat with a big man after that and got very little sleep on account of mosquito paranoia. Thought I´d be glad to reach Piura. Oh how wrong...
