11th February Motupe – Piura 119 miles

Went to bed last night with the sound of kids shouting and traffic tooting their horns and woke up to exactly the same sound, when do they sleep?
We went off to find somewhere for breakfast, non at the hotel, and you wouldn’t believe how difficult that was. We eventually had a coffee and 2 dry rolls, that’s fine.
Off on the road having gased and watered up and we make better progress today as the villages get less frequent and we can get moving.
You may wonder why there were 2 routes when we are following the Pan Am, well this is the old route and they have now cut a new road neaqrer the coast, this was good for us really as there were far less trucks than we would have had on the new route.
We did divert to a village which was noted in Martins book as, ‘being very pretty and worth a visit’, we drove around and then left, my comment to Martin was worth a visit, not worth getting off the bikes for’. I don’t know why it was highlighted as it was very similar to the village we stayed in last night and didn\t seem to have anything special or different.
We are stopping in Piura which was our scheduled stop for last night, so a short day in the saddle today.
There is a museum here we want to go and see as it has a model of the largest ship in the war of the Pacific and it was built in the UK.
Having found a hotel and parked the bikes we choose to go to the museum in a tut tut, our term for the little motorbike taxis. We have spent the last few weeks trying to avoid them on the road and now we are in one we can see why, its not really that bad. He does however drop us off at the end of a street and says its down there, well it was, about 2 ½ blocks, but it only cost 65p and seemed to take us half way round the city.
The museum was nt where it was advertised on the city map but just around the corner and a willing local took us there. The museum is the home of a captain and he may well have been more than that but everything was in Spanish. His name was Miguel Grau and he is obviously well thought of and remembered as we have seen his name several times before. It was well laid out as an exhibit and a large bronze statue of him was in the garden with him sitting on a bench, if it was life size he was a big man.
A wander around the square with shoe shine boys wanting to polish my sandals and then a yellow cab back to the hotel. All the cabs here are tiny, usually the small Daewoo, we went in a modern one which was a Matiz, 80p for 4 wheels.
Can’t leave here until one tomorrow as we have to wait for laundry but we should make Ecuador.