10th February Chimbote – Motupe 262 mikes

My apologies if the blog seems a little boring at the moment, but we have been charging North on the Pan Am and there has been little to see or report, we’ve not taken many photos although we have a few t o go up when we get a decent connection.
The riding has been quite hard as we are just batting along with little to see or break up the journey. Yesterday was difficult to make good progress as we went through so many villages, when you go through these villages you have to slow right down as they have hideous sleeping policemen as you enter and as you leave and occasionally a few in between. There have been a lot of police around as well usually as you leave the village or town, they seem more interested in the lorries thankfully.
We seem to have a problem in that every time we enter a large town we lose the road, we have this every morning when we are getting under way and whenever we pass through big towns. In one large town today we strayed to where roads became mud and asked a local, with a bit of gesticulating and a lot of shouting he put us right, right onto a gravel and sand road. Further advice and we need to follow this for 4k and then we come to the Pan Am, well it was sort of correct after about 10k.
It would seem that we then had an option because Martins sat nav said right and mine said left, we didn’t realized the option until much later. Having ridden for more than 6 hours we have averaged less than 40 mph, so we are not going to reach our chosen destination until about 9 o’clock, well after dark now. So rethink, we will stop at the first decent sized town/village we come to.
Well what looked like a tiny place ended up having a 2 star hotel, how bads that? When we stop we find out why we had an option with both sat navs pointing in opposite directions, mine was showing the more direct coast road and Martins was the mountain route, oh well we are here now.
Having got set up we venture off for a walk around and find a lovely square with a massive church, lots of street traders, many of whom sell food, to eat in your hand and also some have chairs and tables and seem to cook you a meal to order, we haven’t sampled their wares.
Food wise we seem to have a choice of chicken and chips, you wouldn’t want to be a chicken here and would you believe, Chinese. We go for the Chinese with not a china man or woman in site and it is very nice.
Tomorrow we are going to slow down a bit and get to the town we should have stopped at, there is a museum and other things to see there so we will check that out and probably move into Ecuador the following day.