Zorritos

 

Huaquillas was covered in a white cloud when I awoke. I thought for a moment I was back in the mountains. I brought the bike and gear down the three flights of stairs and packed it up in the lobby. I liked the hotel and might have stayed another day but there was only one bank in town and its cash machine did not accept my card. I was down to my last $5. I had to go to Peru.

 

 

I rode back out of town the way I had come to the border crossing I had gone over by bus a month earlier. I stamped out of Ecuador and into Peru and passed across a bridge celebrating the friendship of the two countries. It was a desolate landscape of sandy, burned-over country in both directions and on the Peruvian side the shoulder on the road turned to only a few inches of asphalt to the right of the white line.

 

 

Traffic was now passing me much closer and it brought me memories of riding the white line in Argentina. There the white line was painted directly at the edge of the asphalt and a honk from a truck driver meant you had to get off onto the gravel shoulder or be run down. This stretch of the Pan American in Peru at least gave me a couple inches of black to ride on.

 

 

The road passed through the sandy scrub and through an irrigated area of rice patties and some bananas and then passed nearer to the coast and I was now seeing the Pacific Ocean again. Along the water were a number of tiny, dusty pueblos and then I crossed over mountainous area, needing to downshift into my lowest gear to ascend it, and then a long run-out along the beach into the town of Zorritos, the town I had selected to stay a few nights in.