Chachas to Vilcabamba, roads less travelled

How many times can you change transport in one day? Well nine is a personal record for us. Leave Chachapoyas...taxi-moto-taxi-moto-taxi-moto-taxi-walk across the border-ranchero - arrive in Zumba! We decided to head north into Ecuador via a remote border crossing known as La Balsa. To get there we snaked (painfully slowly as we stopped for numerous road building projects) down from the cold cloud forests into the hot and sticky lowlands past countless rice fields, banana plantations and coffee plants. From there we climbed again as the roads became bumpier and the villages smaller and prettier. It was an amazingly beautiful journey and the people we met on the way were extremely friendly.

The main mode of transport was shared taxi and despite the fact that you are subject to any number of delays as you wait for each taxi to fill with people heading the same way as you, we made excellent time. A particular highlight was when our kindly taxi driver picked up a rabble of children walking along the road from one village to the next - some 10km away. Mike was squished in the back with no less than six wide-eyed, solemn children, including a pair of identical twins who blinked in unison every time I turned around to look at them. Eventually we said goodbye to Peru crossed the river into Ecuador and had some fun and games wrangling with the type of jumped up immigration officer you hope never to meet, who refused to give us more than a 30 day visa (we need 32 days) despite the fact that common practice in Ecuador is to give you 90. We stayed calm, pleaded with him but eventually had to give up and head on.

From there we piled into a ranchero, a flat bed trek with rows of seats bolted inside- kind of like a giant rollercoaster - which wobbled and slid along impossibly steep roads with plunging drops off the side. We finally arrived in Zumba, a completely miserable town where the only accommodation we could find was a hotel that looked suspiciously like it would be possible to rent rooms by the hour. Mike´s pillow had a muddy footprint on it and the owner was drinking neat alcohol out of a litre bottle in a paper bag. We piled our bags against the door and slept on top of the covers in our own sleeping sheets and tried not to think about the sordid lives of the mattresses.

The next day we endured a bumpy ride in a rusty old bomb of a bus, and many delays for landslide clearances, before we eventually made it to the stupendously beautiful Vilcabamba, Valley of Longevity where the fresh water burbling down off the mountains reputedly ensures you a few extra decades of healthy life. And....relax.