On the coast in Peru, in a town called Chiclayo, we saw some ruins of some civilization that had inhabited that area. The ancient people are surprisingly unknown for the scale of artifacts and giant crippled mud pyramids that we saw. We saw a museum of the 'Lord of Span,' which was of a mummy and everything he was buried with, which was an incredible amount of gold, jewels, and other dead shrively people.
But the coolest thing at that point was talking a little bus to the coast, since that made our journeys officially a coast-to-coast trip of the South American continent, and not to mention this tiny Peruvian town on the coast could sport the most out-of-the way beach I’ve ever seen.
First steps in the South American Pacific
It was nice. It looked a lot like the beaches in Corpus Christi, but a bit colder (which was weird and disappointing).
So to get the bus we had quite a full night and day of traveling through jungle towns - going from one to the other to eventually get to this border crossing, which was a little broken bridge with mud buildings where the 'border patrol' insisted that they would help us as soon as they finished their card game (which took 30 minutes). It was certainly one of the less developed border crossings of the world. From there we took a broken old school bus about 2 hours (and 10 km) north to another town. That bus ride through the mountains and jungle was certainly one of the most painful rides I've ever taken. My book described it as 'uncomfortable,' but that doesn't do it justice. The bus had to walls, so I had to grip on as hard as I could to keep from falling out, and afterwards all my organs hurt from all the bouncing on the muddy rocky road.
So we got to this other town, took a night bus farther north, got a hostel, and slept until 11 am, because that was our first of 3 nights sleeping in a bed, not in a nasty stinky bus. From there we continued north, making it through two terminals that day, and taking a supposedly over night bus farther north that would get us in at 6 am, but the bus trip went much faster than we were told it would, so we ended up wandering a more than shady (and dead silent) town at 4 in the morning, waiting for the train station to open, actually waiting by the closed police station because that seemed to be safer. After about 2 hours of freezing and waiting, we caught a security guard opening the station who told us that that train had been out of commission since January... So we headed back to the terminal and caught a 'rest of the night' bus to Quito, where we are now. We get here around 9, left our stuff in a hostel, and took a bus a little ways north to the equator. Being at the equator is actually kind of disappointing, since it doesn’t feel that special, really. It’s just a pretty normal place, but for a short while I was in the same hemisphere as yall.
It gets dark early here, and our hostel has a rooftop terrace overlooking all of Quito, so we spent some time smoking Cuban cigars (which cost 4 dollars here) and drinking wine while overlooking Quito and all the mountains around it. I also spent quite a bit of money at a craft market today. I get kind of obsessed with buying gifts, so I'll have a lot of stuff to bring home. I also want to deck out the new room I will be getting to design with all South American crap. Tomorrow we are climbing a mountain, staying the night in Quito, then heading out to the BEACH. I am so ready to be out of the horrible cold. Well be traveling by boat through the mangrove swamps by the Colombian border down more south where there are jungly sand beaches and good fish.
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