Temporary Nomad

As if our border crossing into Ecuador wasn’t bad enough, the return to Peru was even more horrendous. We were quite lucky to escape with only a severe case of sunburn and extremely sore shoulders.

Strangely enough, this time there was an actual protest, but it didn’t close the border itself. Instead, the road between a town called Arenillas and the border town Huaquillas was blockaded, in some kind of local dispute. The result was that the bus for Huaquillas was forced to stop at Arenillas and everyone on board, us included, had to walk around huge roadblocks made of trucks, earth and the remains of burning tyres all the way to the border, with luggage, in the equatorial sun – in what turned out to be a three hour trek. No traffic whatsoever was allowed through except the trucks and cars of the organisers, which we had to watch passing us by loaded up with supporters shouting slogans as we trudged along, weighed down by our heavy packs.

The road to Huaquillas – snapped on my phone. The road looked a lot longer than this in real life! 

As a result of this excruciating ordeal I suffered pretty severe sunburn and Mike’s arms were so badly rubbed by his backpack straps that he got blisters, but we kept on walking, and finally came to the final roadblock, a little way out of town.

We at last arrived at Ecuadorian passport control only to find a queue forming and no-one staffing the counter for “Salida del Ecuador” – exiting Ecuador. After waiting for half an hour in the sun, the news gradually trickled through that their computer system was down, with an unknown wait until it was fixed, which turned out to be yet another hour queuing in the sun.

Having left at 9am on what was meant to be a 2 hour journey we finally arrived at our destination Tumbes in Peru at 3:45, with 15 minutes to spare before our flight check-in time.

The moral of the story is – whatever you do, steer clear of Huaquillas.