2:50 AM. What am I doing up at 2:50 AM? Just listening to women moaning over loud music, that’s all. I learned my lesson the hard way today: never stay at an ‘auto motel’ or love motel. The men bring the women here just to screw and pay for a room for $6 for maximum 5 hours. And they try to cover up the moaning and the screaming with loud music, which is what I woke up to at 1AM. Yes, 1 freaken AM. I tried sleeping in the car, which was useless, and now I’m just waiting. Looks like there’s a lot less men that want to screw at 3AM, so I should be ok in a bit.
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I finally fell asleep sometime after 4AM, because some dude was watching TV right outside my precious love motel room. But at least I did fall asleep… until 6AM, when the roosters started their morning routines. So I was obviously really tired, but I’m feeling better now that I’ve got a place to sleep for tonight.
So I woke up at 6AM and left for the Ecuador border by 7AM, because it being a love motel, they charge by the hour and I had paid for 10 hours. I was hoping to get to the border before all the crazyness built up, but I was too late. The road leading to Peru is in total distress and it took me an hour and a half to get there.
The Ecuador-Peru border crossing was one of the worst, if not the worst. Some markets block the street entrance to the bridge, so I had to drive around it. Plus, it being Sunday, most of the shops, including photocopy places, were closed for the day. To make matters worse, they were saying even the Aduana (Customs) is closed for today! And that place is 3 kilometers away from Immigration point for Ecuador to exit! So I passed the immigration exit checkpoint for Ecuador, and hired some dude that spoke good enough English that he could understand me.
So I know this guy is trying to cheat me somehow. He talks to some dude, who says that since Aduana for Ecuador is not open, he can get me entrance to Peru without exit papers from Ecuador for $50. At least that’s what he said in Spanish and I understood it. Then Jose, the guy I hired, turns around and says to me ‘he wants $75.’ I said that’s too much, and he says, well, how much would you pay? And I say ‘$20.’ And he laughs and says that’s way too little.
Well, the Aduana for Ecuador actually wants to do me a favor and get me my exit stamp for the vehicle today. I go to the only photocopy place open to make copies of my passport, this time with the exit stamp on it. So I go back 3 km to get my passport exit stamp. Then back to the photocpy place, and back to the Aduana, where all the craziness is ensuing. But before then, I enter the biggest sham yet. Jose for some reason tells me I need to use the ATM to get some cash because there are no ATMs in Peru for a long time. So I grab about $60 in cash and go. Later, he tells me to stop at a place where he says the exchange rate is better.
Turns out I got shammed about $30 today because I trusted this fucker with the exchange rate. I exchanged $96 for about 2:1 ratio when it shouuld have been closer to 3:1. I found this out when I was 3km over in Peru for my Immigration paperwork. Anyway, I get my exit papers, and the Aduana guy for Peru wants money. I give him $3 (rather, give Jose $3) and he actually started to do his job! Then he tells me to dig up all my paperwork. In all the borders I’ve ever crossed (and I’ve crossed plenty now), this is the only guy that asked for my International Driver’s License AND my car insurance for back home! How does this make any sense? I have no idea. What would a car insurance back home do any good for Peru? Absolutely nothing! But I think he was just looking for a reason to get more money out of me. He also noticed a discrepancy in my title, where my Middle name is spelled wrong by a letter. What a bastard…
Anyway, I fill up the gas and grab something to eat for lunch, which is actually really cheap and really good. I thoroughly enjoyed that. Then I started my journey down Peru’s highways, which I’ve heard are really, really good. It didn’t start very good, though. One of the cities had some kind of march going on so they closed off half a boulevard’s worth and it took a while to get through. But afterwards, I could see what they are talking about. Good roads make me happy. It means that I don’t have to swerve in and out of the road and can go pretty much as fast as I want, getting me to places faster, obviously.
But see, that means a lot because I finally left the border at about 11:00AM. So to get halfway to Lima, where hopefully I can find a Mercedes mechanic, it meant I needed to drive 450 miles before the day was over. By the time I finished my lunch, it was about noon.
So thankfully, the roads are so awesome that I drive about 65-70 miles an hour on average, only because I notice some cops close to the towns and actually passing through the towns itself takes the most amount of time. Otherwise, I’m going 70-80 miles an hour on the highway. There was a one stretch where I was surrounded by nothing but sand for about 125 miles. It was great because nobody was on this great highway. I arrived here at this Hostal at about 7:30PM, and paid about $10 for my own parking space and hot showers.
Peru is strangely delightful. It’s got its own limitations, obviously, but the desert definitely puts a different spin on this country. Considering all the countries I’ve been to have been fairly tropical, it’s like being back in California, what with the desert and the quality of the roads.
But, it’s also incredibly big. It’s the biggest country next to Mexico I’ve been to so far and it’s almost painful looking at the map, knowing I’m going to have to take more than a week here to do all the things I want to do. Chile is obviously the longest drive.
Couple things are starting to really bug me about the drive, though. First, the days ARE getting shorter. Now that I’m south of the equator, I can really tell. Second, it IS colder down here right now. I almost miss the heat of California, but at least the days are more barible here.