May 15, 2007, 9pm Lima time
Chala, Peru
GPS: S 15 86.164, W074 24.791

Distance Traveled: 730km

What an incredibly frustrating day.  We seem to be getting a lot of these, now that I take a moment and think back.  Ah, well, - today has had it's great moments.

We were up and out on the highway this morning by 7:30am, later than we'd've liked, but it turned out not to actually matter.

'Cause the border between Chile and Peru doesn't open until 8am.  Fifteen minutes after we'd arrived, the border opened, and it turned into a mad rush for parking outside the customs office.  We all fought to maintain our space, but it turned out not to matter, 'cause we were the last ones to leave.  By a long margin.

This border crossing, by leaps and bounds, was the worst we've had yet.  It took us two and a half hours to get from Chile into Peru, and by 11:30 we had covered just 50kms.  I don't know why the Chilean/Argentinian borders were so quick and smotth, by comparison, but the Chilean/Peruvian border was an exercise in frustration.  We had to fill out, in quadruplicate, special new forms for our motorcycles that contained exactly the same information as on our carnets.  

But these special forms we had to fill out didn't have carbonated paper, for quick-and-easy duplication.  Nor did they have spare sheets of carbon paper.  We got three sheets, so each form had to be filled out one at a time.  The wind was also blowing, so we got to chase down loose bits of make-work-border-crossing-balogna.

While we were running around this busy-work project, Dad told me a story about when he lived in Yellowknife, how the mining companies there were required to hire a certain percentage of native (Inuit) population to work on the mines.  I guess they (the mining companies) didn't want to train the Inuit laborers, so they (the Inuit) were put to work digging potholes, and filling them back in again.  That is exactly what this border crossing felt like.

I think i've mentioned it before, but we have to go through customs when we leave a country, as well as when we enter it – not like the Canada/US border, where you go through just one set.  We get to go through two.  

By the time the Peruvian customs agent finished duplicating all the infromation on our carnets, we were finally ready to go, at about ten minutes to nine.  There's a final inspection station on the highway before we can leave the customs area, and we can't get through, 'cause we're missing a stamp.  Back to the SAME guy, who casually stamps all the papers, and then over to the highway guard.  He points out that we forgot to fill in the date on one of our forms, and for a minute we think he's going to send us back.  But I guess he was feeling magnanimous, and said he'd fill it out for us.  Thanks.

Tacna is a fair-size city about ten minutes into Peru, and Dad stopped there so he could find a bank machine and take some money out.  Justin and I remained behind to guard the bikes.  They took forever, and he and I ended up buying watches for 20 solaris (or solara? - that's what the Peru currency unit is called), which works out to about $7.
Well, it works out to about $7 if Justin is the one doing the money exchange.  He was able to get a 3:1 Solari:USD ratio at a money changer at the border.  When Dad took money out of the bank machine, it only gave him a 2:1 ratio.  Ouch.

While Justin and I were waiting for Dad to come back with money, we attracted a very large crowd of locals, which made us kind of nervous.  They turned out to just be curious (of course) and, as I mentioned, we bought some watches.  During this time, two police officers came over, one of whom spoke english, and asked if there was anything wrong.  Extremely friendly (and it's always nice to find a fellow english-speaker), he just wanted to let us know that if we ever had a problem, anywhere in Peru, we could just go find a police officer and they'd help out.  He shook my hand as Sean finally came back, and we were on our way.  

I should mention here that we don't have detailed GPS maps for any cities farther north than, say, Santiago.  When we try to leave a city that has more than one road, we all kind of follow Rob, wo attempts to locate the highway by following an arrow in a big blank section of map on his GPS.  So far, it's worked pretty well.

The intial section of Peru is pretty much identical to Chile, but soon we started hitting canyons.  Talk about some breathtaking scenery.  For the first fifteen minutes.  After that, and the back-and-forth of cutting up and down canyon walls gets monotonous, not to mention that roads like that keep our average speed down to about 70 km/h, which really impacts on our daily average.  

While the tops of the canyons, and the plains around, are barren wastelands, the canyons themselves are oases of life.  Cattle, crops, chicken, all nestled in these little canyons.  Then we leave that behind and go up another set of steep switchbacks.

By four o'clock, we'd managed to make 500kms, and the inland road moved out to the coast.

THESE roads were incredible.  The scenery was amazing, but the mountains that this road cut through dropped straight off to the ocean.  There were no guardrails, and in some places the cliff had fallen away and eaten at the (1.5 foot wide) shoulder of the road all the way onto the road proper.  There's no room for error on roads like these, and by the time the sun was setting at 5pm, we were all exhausted and bloody sick of extremely sharp turns on the edges of cliffs.  We pulled over to take a break and clean our visors (we were riding into the sun at this point), and when we got back on the highway, it was like it had been replaced by a nice road.  

We were riding almost exactly at the level of the ocean, the road was straight and easy to follow, and traffic had lightened up considerably.  We were able to easily double our pace over the past few hours.  I was even able to watch a complete sunset over the ocean.

So draining was those few hours in the ocean switchbacks that when we hit a fair-size down called Chala, we stopped to grab a hotel and a bite to eat.  We weren't about to risk hitting another set of those impossible roads in the dark, 'cause that would be suicide.

Chala was hopping when we pulled in.  I don't know if we always manage to hit these towns on a market day, or what, but it seems like we're always weaving our way through crowds when we're looking for a hotel.  

We had the best barbecue chicken i've ever had in my life, and then Dad and I had a nice romantic walk on the beach while Justin and Rob went off shopping in the market.  We found a crab, and chased him with a lighter until that got boring.  Now, I'm going to go find an interweb connection, post this, and then go to sleep.

Good night!
Ryan Noble
Chala, Peru