Welcome to Peru

Sunday the 17th - Tuesday the 19th of October 2010
From Loja an excellent road (again: Correa is doing a great job in terms of infrastructure) leads to the border crossing with Peru in Maracas (Ecuador). To get through all the administrative steps of leaving Ecuador and entering Peru we had to leave the bus for 10 minutes. Those ten minutes were enough for me to accumulate about 9 mosquito bites... Welcome to Peru.
We had left Loja at around 23h (on Sunday) and entered Peru at 4h15 in the morning (on Monday). At around 8h we arrived in Piura (Peru). There we about 5h to explore this small, but charming industrial city in the north of Peru. In the center of the town we could admire a procession of the patron saint of Peru and we further visited the house/museum of General Grau, a Peruvian hero in the war on the Pacific Ocean that was fought between Chile on one side and Peru and Bolivia on the other.
After lunch we left for Trujillo. We spent over 8h in the bus that I used to write the first English texts for our blog. When looking up from my pc now and then, I was stunned by the landscape. I was expecting a lively, green patch of land, instead we saw a raw, empty, desert like landscape as far as the eye can reach. Since then we have traveled further south in Peru and we found out that the whole coast of Peru is pretty desertisch. Beautiful, but very dry. In Trujillo we switched buses. This time we embarked on a night bus. It was our first encounter with the luxurious buses that you can find in Peru. De roads in Peru are generally worse than the fresh ones in Ecuador, but on the other hand, the buses are that much better. We felt in first class of an Emirates Airlines flight, including steward. After a journey of 10h we arrived in Huaraz, our first real stop in Peru. It was now at around 7h in the morning on Tuesday....