After a quick breakfast in the hotel restaurant, we finished up the air filter maintenance, and loaded up.\u00a0 Today was an easy and fast ride to the border.\u00a0 The border town situation, however, was one of the most ugly we had had to deal with.\u00a0 First we had to backtrack from the border itself through this creepy, busy town to find the immigration hut to get our exit stamp from Ecuador, and stand in line for 20 minutes there.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Then we had to fight our way onto a bridge, crowded with market stalls and foot traffic, to get to the Peruvian customs station, where Levi spent over an hour filling out forms for entrance of the bikes, while I tried to keep track of our stuff and satisfy all the curious locals.\u00a0 We had come prepared with photocopies of all\u00a0our basic documents, but, of course, they now wanted a photocopy of the Ecuadorian exit stamp that we had just gotten as well, so Levi had to march off into the crazy market madhouse on the Peruvian side looking for a photocopy place, which, being Sunday, was not easy to find.\u00a0 It was here that I first met Pat, an adventure rider on a Suzuki V-strom traveling around the world from Ireland.\u00a0 We met up with him again later, but he, of course, first had to backtrack, like we did, 3 km. back into Ecuador to get his exit stamp.\u00a0 They just do not make it easy!<\/p>\n
After customs, we went a few km. into Peru, and stopped again at the Peruvian immigration station.\u00a0\u00a0 This only took a few minutes for each of us, but before we could leave we got told we had to pay for parking in the lot outside the immigration building!\u00a0 Welcome to Peru!\u00a0 All in all, we made this border in just under 2 hours, which may be a record for us.<\/p>\n
Away from the border, we stopped in a tiny Pacific coast town for some ceviche and beer – what a treat!\u00a0 Soon after that we met up with Pat Cahill again, and we rode together the rest of the day.\u00a0 We stopped for the night in a Pacific coast tourist town, Manicora, and had our choice of dozens of hotels and hostels.\u00a0 We chose a very funky hostel on the beach, with typical hostel accommodations (rough rooms, cold showers,\u00a0and bunk beds), but a nice warm swimming pool (don’t mind the scum) and a bar and internet for Levi.\u00a0 It was a neat place to stay, with nice other guests, but kinda noisy and buggy.\u00a0 It is now very warm and humid here, as it\u00a0was all day.\u00a0 Pat shared a 4-bed room with us, and we are enjoying his company very much.\u00a0 He is a commercial pilot from Ireland, who\u00a0is doing the global circumnavigation as a way to raise money for hospice service in Ireland.\u00a0 He is a stitch with lots of great stories and a wonderful accent.<\/p>\n
We all walked the town, and settled on a dirt-floor restaurant for a seafood dinner.\u00a0 The Pacific here is beautiful, calm and warm.\u00a0 A charming place in many ways.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
After a quick breakfast in the hotel restaurant, we finished up the air filter maintenance, and loaded up.\u00a0 Today was an easy and fast ride to the border.\u00a0 The border town situation, however, was one of the most ugly we had had to deal with.\u00a0 First we had to backtrack from the border itself through […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[6,22],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.longridesouth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1782"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.longridesouth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.longridesouth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.longridesouth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.longridesouth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1782"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.longridesouth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1782\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1785,"href":"https:\/\/www.longridesouth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1782\/revisions\/1785"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.longridesouth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1782"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.longridesouth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1782"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.longridesouth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1782"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}