The roadblocks by the highland people, protesting about the free trade agreement with the US, cut off Riobamba for 4 days from the main north-south highway. We went walking on the old Inca royal trail up in the nearby mountains to find it being used by trucks, trying to bypass the roadblocks. Progress? At the end of our walk getting back to Riobamba we hit the roadblocks too, but being on foot we just stepped over the logs and rocks and walked through. A jeep with western tourists in, however, had one of its tyres slashed and hurriedly did a U-turn. The people manning the blocks seemed to be thoroughly enjoying themselves and told us that the blocks would continue for quite a while, though they might take a few days off to go and till their fields.
We had wanted to head south from Riobamba but when we heard that the road northward was opening up, we decided to head back to Quito rather than wait for the road south to clear, especially as the newspapers were forecasting food shortages.
Back in Quito we caught up with films at the cinema: the best being Munich. Then we got a bus southwest to Guayaquil on the coast. We hit more road blocks getting out of Quito but our plucky bus driver took us down village back roads, country tracks and past burning tyres in a big detour down to the lowlands and then south.
From the hot, steamy, prosperous city of Guayaquil we headed south last week and over the border into Peru for a few days relaxing and swimming at the beach.
Northwest Peru is known as the Egypt of South America, because of its landscape of desert with irrigated green river valleys and because of its archeological sites which we spent the last few days visiting.
Hundreds of years before the Incas the Moche people built large cities with high walls and pyramids out of mudbricks, irrigated the land and developed a religiuos and artistic culture. Excavations of the royal tombs in the last 20 years have revealed large amounts of beautiful gold jewellery and colourful ceramic vases, now displayed in a modern museum.
Peru suffers from a national shortage of change aswell as the circulation of counterfeit currency. So buying anything involves the shopkeeper throwing his hands up in horror when we have no change, sending one of the family off down the street to borrow change off someone else and then us carefully examining the notes we finally get in change. Our hotel yesterday gave us a signed IOU ( se le debe in Spanish) as they could find no change.
Yesterday evening we got the 10 hour night bus up to Huaraz, in the mountains, where we arrived early this morning.
