We’ve been pushing hard to get north in Peru. Given our desire to be back home in mid-July, we’re having to make decisions about what to see and what we’re going to skip.
After Machu Picchu and Nazca, we decided to head to northern Peru and skip much of central Peru. That meant getting on Peru-1/the PanAmericana in Nazca and moving up the coast through Lima. Peru-1 is not scenic. It is mostly desert, and not really beautiful desert at that. Which is to say the landscape is nice, but you can’t look at it because you need to avoid the trucks overtaking on blind corners, the trucks piled high with some sort of plant material, and the endless speedbumps.
Mostly the road is dusty, with frequent police checks and dingy towns. The drive from Nazca to Lima was pretty good (including the nicest rest-stop I have ever been to in the 35-odd countries I’ve driven through), but Lima to Chimbote was pretty dire. We got pulled over by the police a few times at checkpoints; the first stop outside of Lima was because they wanted our REAL headlights on, not our daytime running lights. That took about 20 minutes to sort out but we got away without a fine. The remaining times it was just an insurance and license check that passed without incident. We had hoped that Chimbote would be a charming sea-side fishing town to spend the night in, but it was a rather uncharming sea-side fishing town. C’est la vie.
We got pulled over on the drive after Chimbote as well: Jessie was driving and was distracted during a lane-change in a traffic circle and didn’t use her blinker (too much time in Boston). A motorcycle cop waved her over to the side, and after a check of our documents called me out of the passenger side to explain that my wife needed to use either her blinkers or her lights. We’ve noticed that after Chile we’ve gotten into much more conservative cultures, where Jessie will address people and they’ll respond to me as the Man of the House. This is frustrating for two reasons: first, Jessie’s Spanish is considerably better than mine, and second because Jessie is perfectly happy to let me deal with whatever mess we’re in. So here I am, standing in front of the car while this cop is telling me what my wife is doing wrong, as if I can somehow do something about this. Thankfully it was a quick stop, no money was asked for, and we got away with just me getting a lecture about my wife’s bad driving.
We decided that Peru would not tolerate rushing: anytime we’ve tried to do something quickly in Peru, we’ve ended up disappointed and frustrated. Anytime we took three days to do what on paper should take one, we had a blast. With this in mind, we gave up on trying to make quick progress north, ditched the PanAmericana, and headed inland to Cajamarca.
Pretty much as soon as we got off Peru-1N, things improved: traffic dropped off and the scenery started changing from dust-bowl to fields of rice and corn. The drive into Cajamarca was a climb back into the Andes that ended with cresting a ridge and seeing the city stretched out in a sun-lit valley. It was a lovely end to a long drive.
After three days and a thousand kilometers, we decided that a day of rest was in order and we ended up spending two nights in Cajamarca. The town has a nice colonial-era center, and is famous as the location where the Spanish captured, ransomed, and executed the last Incan emperor Atahualpa. We wandered around town for a bit then went to the neighboring town of Banos del Inca to soak in some hot springs.
The next morning we got an early start to drive over to Leymebamba and the Utcubamba River valley. The road connecting Leymebamba and Cajamarca is Peru-8B, which sounds like it should be bigger than the one-lane road it is. For about 4 hours, we wound our way through the Andes along a narrow path, averaging about 20-30 km per hour (the rainy season is ending, so Peru is at maximum pothole). We had a few oncoming cars pass us (which generally worked out well as by chance we happened to be on the inside of the slope and didn’t have to get too close to the edge), but the trip was mostly quiet. There were some spectacular drop-offs next to the road that I occasionally glimpsed when the road ran straight for a bit.
We stopped at the Leymebamba museum which houses a collection of mummies found in the nearby mountains, and then stopped for the night at a hostal in town for a well-deserved rest. We’ll spend some time exploring this valley over the next few days before heading up toward Ecuador.
2 Responses
Navigating roads and local police stops seems so confusing and challenging. Your trip north is a bit of an ordeal instead of a leisurely vacation. I have sensed for several posts that you are running out of time before you are running out of fun. That regularly happened to us when we vacationed as a family. I hope that you can enjoy your trip even with the challenging roads, cliffs and other frustrations. We look forward to more stories and pictures.
Have the police been professional and polite on your trip, or have they been bullies or buffoons? It sounds like with all of the stops and sorting through papers and explaining where you’re going and what you’re doing you’ve spent considerably more time wading through those stops that you could have spent the time enjoying the countries and the people. Oh, well! Keep up with the posting – it’s all fascinating!