mancora

it´s been a little while.

i´m in a little place called mancora, peru. after our week of spanish we wished cuenca and our spanish teacher the best and headed south to the border. it involved nearly 2 days of hell but we got there. from cuenca we caught the 6 hour bus to loja, we arrived there at 2am, checked into hotel londres and got up in time to get the 7am border bus. the bus was about 9 or 10 hours including border formalities.

after a few miles into peru... south america became a whole new ball game. ecuador had been a lush mountainous, picture postcard, landscape... and now we were surrounded by vast flats of desert. the first town was piura. what an absolute hole. no joke. whats worse is the lonely planet say´s not to worry about using US dollars. bull. one tuc tuc ride later we found that to be the case and despite the taxi driver offering to take us to the cash point we managed to walk away only to spend the next hour trying every cash point with a ´visa´sign... finally we got one that worked.




from there it was a mere 4 hours to mancora to be confronted by the best hostel i´ve ever been to in full swing on saturday night. some familiar faces from ecuador and some great volenteers have kept me here since. it´s been a mixed 10 days. for the last 5 i´ve been trying to get rid of a horrible bug that has done the rounds. i won´t describe the symptoms. however, work begins tommorrow... which seems more like play. i´ll be surfing during the day and behind the bar or organising some crazy game at night... if you need me you can catch me on 555-this is the life.

photos are coming i promise.