True Tales of Trekking in Peru

Hey y’all – ok I’m back from Limaland. Sorry I lost my mind a little bit there but I found my way back down to earth again (though I am still waiting for the call).

Before I tell you all about Cusco, let me back up a few days to my arrival in Peru. We’re going to go back to my last day in Cuenca so I can share a little wisdom from the road…

Should you ever find yourself in Cuenca, Ecuador and need to get to Lima, Peru you have two options: fly or bus. Flying takes a few hours. Bus is about 24 hours.

So looking at these two options – the coin toss said fly. (Ok there was really no coin toss. Flying was the only sane option). But then the logistics begin. I can fly from Ecuador but it is 3x as much as flying from within Peru, so as long as I could get across the Peruvian border by bus to the closest town in Peru with an airport (this happened to be Tumbes, Peru from my googling) then I could save mucho dinero on the flight.

Ok – so bus to Tumbes, flight to Lima. Got it. Maps showed that Tumbes was about 6 hours from Cuenca and buses available. Confident in the plan I’d come up with, I headed off to the Cuenca bus station to buy my bus ticket to Tumbes.

Well, turns out there isn’t a bus to Tumbes (ok there is but you have to ask in a super-secret password-like-way and I didn’t know the code at the time, but don’t worry, I know it now and I’ll share it with you later), but I’d already bought the plane ticket from Tumbes to Lima so I had to figure out how to get to Tumbes somehow. Turns out lots of buses go to Mancora, Peru, the supposedly hip beach town for jet setting Peruvians, and backpacking surfers, which is about two hours past Tumbes, so I figured if this was as close as I could get a bus to go, I was sure there was a way to get back to Tumbes from Mancora. So I bought my first overnight bus ticket from Cuenca to Mancora and the first Peruvian trek began.

It’s funny what you read online about buses – and while you wish there was another way to plan your trips sometimes it’s all you’ve got. I read different posts about crossing the border – one that said it was crazy, one that said the crazy post was crazy and it was actually just fine, and one post that said if you take the overnight bus from Cuenca to Mancora you don’t even have to wake up or go through immigration (not sure how that is supposed to work in your favor down the road in Peru, but that’s what it said).

Here’s what actually happened.

I boarded the bus in Cuenca at 9pm (thankfully I got on the right bus by befriending a super sweet German couple) and off we went. The bus was less than 1/3 full so the seat next to me was empty and I was able to both recline the seats and lay down – hoping to sleep on the 6-7 hour ride to Mancora. Well, surprise (in a good way), we did stop at immigration around 1am and were processed out of Ecuador and into Peru. After realizing the overnight bus still had to stop at immigration after all (because why wouldn’t it?) I would have taken a day bus after all.  I suppose the advantage of arriving anywhere at 1am though is that there is no line. It took about 30 minutes to get all of our passports legally stamped and on our way. But when you come out of the immigration office, the bus is gone. (However one that looks exactly like it is in it’s place and it’s super confusing at 130am). Here’s what you do – you follow the pedestrian path about 100 yards (I guess we’re physically walking over the border) and then you find your bus (you know the one that looks like all of the other ones on the other side of the bus station – but more importantly it’s the one with the super sweet German couple you met in Cuenca sitting outside it) and then you wait for like an hour while your bus driver hangs out with all the other bus drivers and then something happens and they’re done visiting and you get back on the bus and head on your trip.

It was also at this point, sometime around 230am I discovered the super-secret password-like-way to get a bus ticket from Cuenca, Ecuador to Tumbes, Peru. What you say is I would like a bus ticket from Cuenca to Huaquillas and then you arrive at the immigration station, walk through the station and when you’re at the other side you’re now in Santa Rosa, Peru and from there you take a taxi 10km to Tumbes. So now you know. I realized this as I was sitting behind the bus watching the drivers chat and then realized I had to ride 2 more hours to Mancora, Peru, just to come back.

But onward we go.

I arrived in Mancora at about 4am. It wasn’t the coolest part of the trip yet but thankfully I found the hostel, they let me check-in and get to my bed and with that, I was in Peru, in Mancora, and super exhausted.

Mancora is quaint. The vibe that I thought I would find was not so much. Definitely more of a surfer town than a jet-setter town, though the gringos there were outnumbered by locals by at least 10×1. Kinda unimpressed I walked to the water, put my feet in and that was about it. They do have cute tuk-tuks but otherwise, I wouldn’t advise going out of your way to go through Mancora (unless of course you can’t figure out how to get to Tumbes, in which case Mancora serves a purpose). The pics make it look better than it was. It was basically beach bums and beer and the hostel wasn’t great – but looking at the pics it seems like it should have been better. But anyway, moving on. Here’s Mancora:

One day later I was on a mini-bus from Mancora to Tumbes to arrive at the airport only to find it was closed. Yes, the airport was closed – any my interpretation of what the security guard told me was that the airport was closed for five days. Obviously this made my face do funny things but then one of my traveling angels appeared – Mary Lynch from Florida. Mary was one of the five or so people camped outside the airport gate and stepped in to save my sanity. Turns out it was 945am and the airport opened at 10am – 10am today, not 10am five days from now, and I realized I really need to get better at this Spanish stuff. So fifteen minutes later, accompanied by my new buddy Mary, the Tumbes airport opened and the journey to Tumbes was complete.

Ok it’s not exactly a formal trek, but it sure was one for me.

Now, onto getting ready for the real trek to Machu Picchu. Let the acclimatization being.