After a chilled few days in our tree house in the woods, we set off on our longest bus to date and our first land border crossing.
Having debated our route from Ecuador to Peru at some length we finally plumped for the ‘jungle’ border crossing at La Balsa. This was partly due to the state of emergency declared in Ecuador earlier in the year, FCDO advise against all but essential travel along the Ecuadorian coast (thereby invalidating our travel insurance if we took the most ‘popular’ border crossing route along there), and partly because we hoped it might be possible to get a flavour of the Amazon in northern Peru via this route.
This route is not very often used to cross the border by all accounts, probably because most of the available information online incorrectly says you have to take about 5 different buses / collectivo’s / chicken buses to get from Vilcabamba in Ecuador, through to Jaén in Peru. After much research (and nearly taking a different (and longer) route), we found out that there was now a once a day direct bus, and so our journey to Peru got going.
I’d like to tell you that this was a fascinating journey though stunning landscapes, and I do have a vague recollection that there was some nice scenery, but mostly it was just long and slow!
After 5 bumpy hours or so (the roads in this part of Ecuador are definitely not smooth ribbons of tarmac, or any tarmac for that matter!) we finally made it to the border. Here we were vaguely waved off the bus to go and get our exit stamps in our passport. However, we didn’t get off the bus fast enough to follow the few locals into the border control office and promptly had no idea where we should be going as there were no signs. We finally found the bus conductor and after some confusion he pointed us in the direction of border control…
From there we then had to walk ourselves across the bridge which crosses the border running along the Rio Canchis, before blindly trying to find Peru’s immigration office on the other side!
After a stop of 45 mins or so to get through the border, we were off again.
I’d been wondering if it would feel different across the border, or whether it would be much the same as Southern Ecuador. The first noticeable thing was the paved road right from the other side of the border. And that the landscape quickly changed to one of banana plantations and rice paddy fields, something that had been absent on the Ecuadorian side.
After another 5 hours or so, we finally arrived into Jaén at around 7pm. And that’s when things turned really strange…
We got off the bus to be met by a sea of mototaxi’s, or tuktuks / auto rickshaws as they are known in other parts of the world. Our research (or lack thereof!) about Peru had not prepared us for this! They were whizzing about everywhere! I honestly felt like we’d be transported not just across the border but to another continent!
We stayed in Jaén for a couple of nights, mainly to give ourselves time to recover from our 11 hour journey and to do a few jobs, such as getting Peruvian money, SIM cards and working out where on earth we were going to head next!
In reality, there isn’t really much to love about Jaén; it’s certainly not a destination city! However, it did give us our very first go on a mototaxi and also our first taste of using the Collectivo’s (essentially just minibuses, but not like in the UK!) that are used a lot in Peru for shorter journeys or those between the less popular routes.
It’ll be interesting to see what the rest of Peru is like!
Sloth Journeys 