Here's how our trip to La Paz turned out:
Friday 1 May 2009
We awaken at 4:45 for our 5:10 taxi to the airport for our 6:05 flight to Lima and on to La Paz. At the 5:45 boarding time a woman dressed in a LAN Peru uniform announces that Lima is foggy and our flight is rescheduled for 8:00 o’clock tonight—what the hell? There’s no way we can make a connecting flight to La Paz without losing two days to travel. Teri forcefully gets to the front of the irate-customer line and learns there is nothing we can do; many of the people in the airport this morning are there because their flight last night was cancelled due to fog in Lima.
We go home and discuss possibilities over desayuno; we’re not going to La Paz and Teri has until next Wednesday off, five full days, so where to go is the question. We discuss money and time, and our wish list of places to visit; the fee for an expired visa is one dollar a day, or $90, and we just saved almost $900 on airfare, assuming we get a refund, so we decide to go to Cajamarca because five days is enough time to do justice to the city and nearby archeological sites. We take a taxi to Transportes Linea and the station is closed; today is a holiday and they are closed—what? We sit in the taxi and discuss possibilities until we change our mind for the second time today; we’re going to Loja, Ecuador, if the bus station is open, and we’ll save almost $1,000 (visa and airfare). The taxi drops us at the curb at 9:00 and the bus leaves at 9:30.
After two hours the bus begins climbing toward the border crossing at Macara and I pull out my passport to look it over. I’m surprised to find that when we last reentered Peru on 3 Feb a very nice woman at immigration spent several minutes on a computer (now, I remember) and she managed to extend my visa for 183 days, or until the 5th of August—we’re leaving Peru on the 30th of July—we don’t need to go to Loja again. We change our minds for the 3rd time today. We’re going to Ayabaca, Yobani’s home town, because it is high on our travel wish list and the time is about the same—five more hours to Loja or to Ayabaca, and the only downside is we’ll lose most of the 56 soles (28 each) we paid to go all the way to Loja. I find more upside when I look in our Peru guidebook and discover there is a road from Ayabaca to Huancabamba and on to Piura so we can do a loop with two nights in Ayabaca and then two in Huancabamba.
The cobrador tells Teri we just missed the turnoff for Ayabaca and the best thing to do is to go on to the border crossing where there are many drivers going to Ayabaca—not! We chat with several drivers and arrange a four soles ride back to the turnoff for Ayabaca where we can get a ride in a car or catch the bus from Piura when it comes by. There’s a car at the turnoff with a young man and woman leaning on it and two men are sitting in the shade eating at a roadside stand. The young man offers to take us the 150 kilometers to Ayabaca for 150 soles and we nix the proposal because that’s all we have on us ($30 USD plus 60 soles). The bus will come by, he says, but not until 3:00; we try to wait him out but it doesn’t work. He says for four soles each he’ll take us to Paimas, a town of 4,000, where there are many drivers going to Ayabaca—not!
He lets the young woman off first and then we get out at a restaurant after going by a garage where there are lots of cars parked but the owner answers an emphatic “no” when the young man asks if there’s someone going to Ayabaca. We decide to eat while we wait and we get a plate overflowing with rice, beans, tamales, and cabrito for four soles each. It’s now past 1:00, getting later by the minute, so we decide that we should go “all in”—Teri will walk back to the garage and offer 100 soles for a ride to Ayabaca. We don’t want to wait for the bus because it won’t get into Ayabaca until after dark and we’ve heard about the dangerous road from Yobani and don’t want to spend any time on it in the dark. It’ll leave us with very few soles but I recall from our other guidebook that there is an ATM in Ayabaca. In ten minutes Teri returns riding in a car with the owner waving out the front window for me to hurry up and get in.
The driver stops for fuel at Gasolinera Virgin de Carmen; it has a billboard with a sexy woman in a low-cut blouse and hot-pants gassing up a car from a pump, but the woman who serves us is dirty, built like a linebacker, and lugs a five-gallon bucket and a funnel to the car. The road immediately turns to gravel and we ford many creeks while simultaneously dodging cows, horses, burros, goats, pigs, chickens and turkeys—all domestic animals in Peru seem to be “free range.” After ½ an hour the road gets very rough, in another ½ an hour it gets very steep, and in the next ½ an hour we’re in a rain forest where it is (surprise!) raining and the rain comes harder the more switchbacks we negotiate. The road is almost impassable in several places with mud-filled ruts and puddles that hide what lies beneath; the driver slows to 5 mph in these places, often shifting to low gear, and we bump and bounce and slip and slide our way up the road.
All the windows inside the car fog up and the driver constantly wipes the windshield as he drives so he can see the road even though he has both front windows open; Teri and I have to move to the center of the backseat to get out of the rain that’s blowing in horizontally. At one point we have a cliff on our left side and a steep bank on our right and the driver swerves left to miss a huge pothole and the car fishtails with excess wheel spin. I say, “por favor, no izquierda solo derecha,” and he laughs and tells Teri not to worry, that he does this all the time. “En la lluvia (In the rain?)” Teri asks, and he says that if he knew it was going to rain like this he would not have come. I say, “tambien!” I think to myself that this is the most dangerous thing we’ve done in Peru. I tell Teri that I can’t decide, when we go over the edge, whether it’s best to try and jump out of the car and have it kill me when it rolls over me or stay in the car and die at the bottom of the cliff—I opt for being proactive and jumping out—maybe the car will only smash me into the soft mud instead of crushing me. Teri doesn’t seem to want to talk about it at all—what a pill.
We make it to Ayabaca at 5:30 and we pay the driver with $30 US and 10 soles, leaving us with 30 soles. The driver points down the street through the pouring rain to a two-star hostal in the next block and we put our jackets on inside the car, jump out, and run undercover as much as we can down the street and into the lobby. The manager informs us a habitación matrimonial will be 40 soles and Teri explains we have only 30 soles but we can get more at an ATM and the manager says there is no ATM in Ayabaca. We look at each other with mouths agape. “No problema,” he says as he pushes the registry across the counter as if we’re about to bolt. Both banks, we are informed cordially, will be open tomorrow from 9:00-1:00 and we can pay him then.
After we take a walk around town, staying dry by judicious use of eaves, we go back and talk to the hostal manager about my idea of a loop back to Piura through Huancabamba. He tells us there is indeed a road from Ayabaca to Huancabamba but it is impassable until June and it is best to go there from Piura anyway. We change our minds for the last time today; we’ll stay here one more night and go back to Piura on Sunday morning.
As I’m dropping off to sleep I think about our journey today and I recall a quote of the great Norwegian explorer, Roald Amundsen, the first person to reach both the North and South Poles: “Adventure is just bad planning.”
