Piura to Trujillo, Peru (February 2014)

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15 February 2014 – Saturday – Piura to Trujillo, Peru

We had a slow morning at the hotel as our bus to Trujillo is not scheduled to depart until 3 pm and hotel checkout was 12 noon. We packed, did some internet research and blog writing and had a late breakfast at the shopping centre (chicken empanadas and coffee) and stocked up on munchies for the seven hour bus ride, another 400+ miles of the Pan-American Highway. The first 200 hundred kilometres is straight and flat through the northern deserts of Peru. We weren’t expecting to see or travel through a vast desert of wind-shifted sands and sand dunes. This desert is known as the Sechura Desert and extends from the Pacific coast inland to the edge of the Andes. It was an amazing vista to travel through as the sun set in a brilliant but deep red in the dusty western haze. We were seated in the front upstairs of the two-decker coach and had a panoramic view of the roadway ahead during the trip.

One of the other things it was hard not to notice and be a little disturbed by was the hand-built memorials to accident victims that occur almost as regularly as the kilometre markers. They stand starkly in the sand bearing the names and dates of death of accident victims. The crosses and small concrete structures about the size of a doghouse are too numerous to count but there are thousands of them and unfortunately this does not surprise us all that much. The road is heavy with traffic: heavy goods vehicles and articulated lorries, long distant coaches and local buses, private cars and yellow taxis, three wheeled moto-taxis, donkey-drawn goods carts, motorcycles, pedestrians and school children, all recklessly use the road, honking continually and weaving in and out of slower traffic ahead, passing on curves and up inclines without hesitation or due consideration of oncoming traffic. We saw all this from our perch at the front of the bus and were very happy to arrive at Trujillo only one hour behind schedule.

We shared a taxi to our brand new ultra modern boutique hotel, called Hotel Due, with a lovely young Canadian couple who were on a one-month vacation in Peru that was full of travel and adventure and hiking and blessed with the exuberance and enthusiasm of youth unleashed!

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