May 17th, 2007.  12:30am Lima time
Machala, Ecuador
GPS: S03 15.776, W079 58.169

We were finally able to get ourselves an early start today.  Rob had us up and at 'em by 4:30am, and we were on the road by 5:30.  We managed to make some pretty good time – a combination of desert riding, and practically no traffic on the road.

Today we drove through Nasca, home of the famous too-small-to-see-except-from-the-air drawings in the desert.  And, today we hit our most western point in South America.

Unfortunately, that didn't last for very long.  For big chunks of the day, we were riding along the coast, and we started hitting these towns every few kilometres or so.  It's really hard to make good distance when you have to slow down to 35 km/h every five or ten minutes.

That brings me to my next topic.  The policemen in Peru are everywhere – they comprise a significant portion of the population.  And a lot of them are jerks.  We got pulled over again for doing nothing at all.  This guy want to see our registration.  He had even less English than we had Spanish, and it took a long time for us to understand what he wanted.  So we gave him our insurance papers.

Turns out, we were apparently supposed to buy special Peru insurance.  If anybody told us this, we didn't understand.  Anyways, he kept trying to get us to pay him for a fine – 'infraccion', but we wouldn't, 'cause we had insurance and all our papers.  We pretended that we didn't have any cash, and that we needed to go on to the next city to get cash.  Yeah, like we'd come back for the copies of our driver's licenses and registration.  He eventually gave up and told us to go on.

One thing that i've been meaning to mention for a long time, but keep forgetting is the little shrines on the side of the road.  They're everywhere.  I'm pretty sure it's like the crosses people in Alberta put up when someone dies on the side of the road, as a kind of reminder to get people to slow down.  These, though, are spectacular.  They're often made of brick, painted and decorated with religious ornaments.  They're often small (but certainly not always), though, so when I first saw them, I thought that they were doghouses.

We'd been told that the border between Ecuador and Peru closed at 9pm, so were in a big rush to make the 1100 or so kilometres from Huames to the border.  We didn't even stop for lunch, although we did stop once just so dad could pee, and another time 'cause we needed caffeine.  We were all starving, but this little by-the-highway place didn't have much for food except for an ice cream, and these pizza-pocket looking things.  But they sure weren't pizza pockets, not even like the empanadas we've had the fortune to eat sometimes.  They were these nasty little dense bread things with corn in 'em, tasted like creamed corn, only dry and thick.  Really sticks to your ribs.  So we didn't finish 'em, and just hopped back on our bikes.

By the end of this day, I was getting a real hate on for Peru.  The roads suck, the cops are jerks, the cities are nasty, and there's garbage everywhere.  Literally.  We drove past several large (several dozen acres) dumps  - well, to call them dumps is to give real dumps a bad name.  This was a collection (by the highway) of trash just tossed on the ground, and lots and lots of it was on fire.  Stank like you wouldn't believe.  I don't think I ever want to come back here.  I'm a bit sorry, though, that we weren't able to stop at this museum Tiberio (he's a fellow motorcyclist in Colombia that Robbie met on the Horizons Unlimited forum – you'll be hearing much more about him when we get into Colombia) wanted us to go to.  It's not all bad, though – the coast is scenic enough to take your breath away, and northern Peru is actually quite nice – it even seems like a bit of a resort area.  One town we drove through had bars and beaches like you'd expect to see in a travel voucher for a tropical getaway.

Most of Peru is desert.  Sand of various colours stretching for miles in every direction.  You can imagine my surprise, and excitement (i am sick and tired of sand) when we crossed a bridge over a river that actually had water in it, and bam! Suddenly we were in sugar cane planations and there's palm trees everywhere and it's just a riot of green.  Unfortunately, that only lasted for about fifteen minutes before we came out of the river valley, and were back to desert.

That was right close to the border, and the border was somethin' else.  If you've ever gone to the States, you'll know that you go to one building, do the customs thing, and move on.  Here, we've got to worry about importing our motorcycles (this is where the Carnets are coming in real handy) as well as customs.  And we have to do that leaving the country as well as entering the other one.  Normally, the customs and police stations are contained within one building for each country in question.

Not between Peru and Ecuador.  To go from Peru to Ecuador, one must first visit the Peruvian Customs station, which we found without too much trouble.  Then we actually go to the border and visit Internacional Policia to have our bikes exported.  This is about three kilometres down the road.  In the middle of a city that spans both countries.  And it's just hopping with people.  They'd told us that the Policia station was three kilometres down the road, and it was actually two.  Rob, Justin and Sean drove right past it, and the policia guy was really, really mad at them for it.  We apologized many times, and he finally calmed down.  I didn't see the big deal – we came back, and there seriously isn't any sign on the building – we had people running after us waving their hands.  We were also apparently the only ones that had to do this customs thing – other people on motorcycles, on foot, and in vehicles were zipping across the bridge that marked the border in both directions.

We immediately gathered a large crowd of onlookers while we went through the painstaking process of exporting our motorcycles.  We were all quite nervous with such a large crowd of people that we were quite relieved when we finally had the last carnet stamped and we could move on to the Ecuadorian customs office.  We suited up, made a big show about saying bye to all our new friends... and drove the thirty feet across the bridge to the Ecuadorian office to import our bikes.  Damn.  Everyone just kind moved down the bridge and clustered around us again, only this time we felt stupid.

Finally through that phase, we had to go down the road 'about two kilometres' to the immigration office, where we needed to get more papers stamped.  'About two kilometres' turned into three turned into four, and finally about five kms in we found the place.  

With that, we were off, and finally, officially, into Ecuador, at about 10:30pm.  Our first stop was the first town inside the border where we were planning on getting a hotel room and crashing.

Immediately we went through a police checkstop, and they waved us through.  We went through another one a short ways after that, and then we went through a (final) army checkstop where we were greeted with soldiers armed with big machine guns.  And two tanks.  I'm not even kidding.  They waved us through, too.  Then the roads disappeared – most of the forty kilometres into Machala were detours.  I hate the word 'desvio'.

There are no hotels in small towns in Ecuador.  At least, there weren't in any of the towns we stopped in.  And the gas station guy we asked directions from was armed with a sawed-off shotgun.  And it was raining.  We were all already in a paranoid frame of mind 'cause of the border crossing, and all the army people and guns and tanks were not making things better.  We did see some other hotels along the way, but they all charged by the hour.  Yucky.

We finally drove into a largish city called Machala.  Justin noticed a sign for a five-star resort hotel and immediately headed over there.  They wanted too much (of course) but had a guy that spoke English and he gave us directions to the Hotel Americano, which is right across the street from the Hotel San Francisco.  Finally in a hotel room by 12:15am.  No restaurants are open, so we didn't get a chance to eat.

Ryan Noble
Machala, Ecuador