The ice cream in Peru is no bueno

The ice cream here is terrible. It can´t compete with the delicious Magnum bars that Ecuador (and all of Europe) has. It´s quite unfortunate. Other than that, however, our first few days have been pretty interesting...

Right before the border we stopped randomly. We thought it was the border, but it turned out it was just a dinner stop. But the only place to eat dinner was a tiny stand on the side of the road serving beans, rice, and chicken on a stick. Rachel opted for the safe beans and rice and I got the chicken on a stick with some mayo... deeeelicious! Finally got to the border, which was straddling a river, where we saw a rainbow, a goat with a tumor in its udders, and a tiny monkey. It was pretty laid back and easy to get across, just a bunch of stamps and back on the bus we went.

The rest of our bus ride from the border to Piura was fairly uneventful. It was just extremely hot. We were drenched in sweat for 3 hours. The moon was full and beautiful and that´s all we could see for miles.

When we got to Piura in the evening on our first day in Peru, we couldn´t see much since it was almost 10pm. All we noticed was that the taxis here are really cheap, midget sized Daewoos that seem like they are about to fall apart. Somehow our taxi fit 4 travelers and 4 giant bags on the way to our hotel (we traveled with a Canadian couple we met on the bus). Magic. We went to get some pizza down the street for an extra late dinner with the Canadians. During the meal, we tried Inca Cola, which is the Peruvian soda of choice. It's neon yellow and has an aftertaste like bubble gum. Odd, yet somehow it tastes pretty bueno. We had a little problem after dinner when we tried to pay in US dollars and the owner wouldn't accept our 5's because they were too old looking, but it worked out in the end.

The hostal we stayed at was a bit weird. There were a lot of shirtless men who liked to walk by our room at 8am repeating Rachel´s name over and over in high pitched voices.

The next morning, Rachel aquired a Peruvian boyfriend. A woman told us we could get some small change from a mysterious black door across the street, so we took her word for it and walked over to the door and Rachel asked through a hole in the door... the guy inside said he couldn't make change for us but told us about some casas de cambio a few streets over. We thanked him and then sat down for a bit in front of our hotel to look at our map real quick. A few minutes later a woman ran across the street and handed us a piece of paper. It turned out to be a hand-drawn map of the location of the casas de cambio from the guy across the street. But best of all, it included his name, phone number, and the words ¨OK. Baby.¨ Yay Rachel. Classic.

We then decided to go to Colán for the day, which is a beach town an hour and a half away from Piura. After a bus ride through the desert (the north of Peru is all dirt and shrubbery... and HOT) we found ourselves in the wild wild west, aka the port town of Paita. This town is ridiculous. I don't think I saw a single plant in the entire town, it was just dirt, more dirt, mountains of dirt, shacks, buses, and tuk tuks. (It was a big surprise to see the tuk tuks here as soon as we crossed the border! I had no idea they were popular outside of Asia.) A nice policeman showed us where to find a colectivo taxi that would take us the rest of the way to Colán. There were 5 of us in the taxi, ready to go, but the taxi driver was adamant about fitting in one more person. Rachel ended up in the front seat sitting above the stick shift next to a Peruvian man with a load of brooms. She made a joke about how it was so squished up front and her new friend assured her that it would be fine because she was ¨thin, just like Barbie!¨.

Colán, the supposed resort for the jet set of Peru, turned out to be completely deserted except for Rachel and I. We were the only people there other than the actual residents, dogs, and crabs. We somehow always seem to find the most deserted towns and hostals. And again, the town was all dirt. At least it had some interesting dirt cliffs to mix things up a bit. We stayed at a hospedaje, or a family home with some rooms to rent out, right on the water, literally. There was no beach, just the water up to our back porch. The owner was a bit scatter brained, ADD, super friendly, and confusing. Half of the time we didn't understand what he was telling us even when he spoke in English, and the other half of the time he was repeating himself. Our room was in the back of the house and we had a nice ocean breeze blowing through. Or so we thought. Antonio (I think that's his name) tried to sell us on the room based on just that, yet the nice breeze mysteriously disappeared at night and it was the most hot, uncomfortable, and restless sleep I think I've had on this trip so far. To top it off, I was eaten alive by mosquitos on every appendage of my body, including all over my face! Who do those mosquitos think they are? Speaking of mosquitos, we discovered a bit too late that the northern coast has malaria. Yet everyone there assured us that ¨los animales¨were harmless and we'd be fine. I guess we'll see soon enough!

We took a walk around the dirt road our hospedaje was on. Well, more like we walked 100 feet in one direction, saw an endless sea of more dirt road, one empty, lifeless restaurant after another, and it was hot... and then we turned back. That was the extent of our exploration of the town, minus our mad dash along the shoreline to view the backsides of all the deserted beach houses and see some funny looking crabs. I slept, Rachel read a bit, and we had some lunch at our place... delicious delicious fish. I inhaled mine. Dinner was more fish. We chose to eat at one of the 20 deserted restaurants on our street and were served by a cute abuelita (tiny little grandma). We ended up chatting with her in Spanish after our meal for a good 20 minutes or so. She was hard to understand sometimes because she was missing most of her teeth, but we were pretty proud of ourselves for being able to talk to her for so long. We played with her son's dog and her cats for a while but after I screamed after seeing a giant grasshopper, they ran away (oops). And so we went home, too.

The next morning the woman running the place assured us that we could just go outside on the dirt road and wait for a camioneta that would pass by ¨right now¨and take us back to Paita so we could catch our bus home. We waited outside in the hot, hot sun for a while. No sign of life, much less a camioneta. Some random woman with a bucket from across the street came over to us, sat down, and asked, ¨Why aren`t you getting on a camioneta? They are right there in the street going past us.¨Well, they weren´t, and she apparently a bit loco. She left, and finally a few minutes later we heard some manic honking coming towards us in the street. It was our camioneta, coming to save the day! It honked a good 20 times more before it realized we wanted to hitch a ride. We hoped into the old white van and soon we were cruising the streets of Colán honking at every human being. Occasionally the driver whistled at the ladies. After we'd squeezed in some more people and were at maximum capacity, we headed up the cliffs toward Paita.

Our bus ride back to Piura proved to be quite entertaining. It included a salesman who spoke for about 40 minutes on the dangers of intestinal worms in children and he even had some great, extra large, color photos of worms ´n kids to show us to illustrate his point. After his speech, he tried to sell us some natural laxatives so that we could clean our intestines out the recommended 4x per year. A few people actually bought the packets. After he was satisfied that he had sold enough, he launched into another spiel about a vitamin powder that you can sprinkle in and on anything you eat... nobody ended up buying that one.

We unfortunately had to go to the airport asap once we got back to Piura because here in South America they give your flights away if you don't show up 2 hours before your departing flight (this goes for local flights). We hailed a cab on the street and ended up having a lovely chat with our taxi driver about how beautiful we were. It was actually really fun to speak with him in Spanish, and he was impressed with our ability to actually understand him since he said most tourists have no idea what's going on. But as we got closer to the airport, he suddenly asked us if all the girls in the US were beautiful. This turned into him telling us how ugly every single Peruvian girl was, and that compared to them we were ¨reinas¨(queens). I asked why, since I think there are a lot of beautiful Peruvian women. He said it was because of our faces. I guess he`ll be moving to the United States soon...

Once at the airport, we realized that we were super early... the lights weren`t even on in the building! There were two guards who were nice enough to turn on the lights and fans for us. Then we just sat around for 2 and a half hours. I had a grilled cheese sandwich when the restaurant finally opened. That was about it. Our flight to Lima was pretty smooth and we got there in about an hour and 10 minutes... not too shabby. San Diego-Berkeley style. But even better, the plane was the most modern one I'd ever been in, the snacks were delicious and choclately, and all of the flight attendants were young attractive males. Haha. More on Lima next time!