August 24, 2018 – August 27, 2018

We were headed back to the coast in order to take the longer, but faster, route toward Cusco.  We stopped for breakfast in the town of Huaraz, which is an important tourism centre for trekkers making their way to the Cordillera Blanca. Much of Huaraz (90%) was wiped out by the devastating Peruvian earthquake of 1970 and many memorials exist in neighbouring communities to catastrophic avalanches and mudflows known as aluviones which roiled down steep mountain valleys from the glaciers in the cordillera above on other occasions over the last 300 years.

We drove through high alpine fields, then zigzagged for miles down towards the coast through dry, desert like mountains.  It was getting late in the day and we needed a place to stay for the night, and we ended up in a (former?) love motel in the town of Barranca, on the coast of Peru.

Love motels are something that we have seen ever since we entered Mexico. Basically, a love motel is a motel  where you can rent a room by the hour.  Some of the features of love motels are that they are very secure and provide private, enclosed garages in front of each room, so that you can discretely park your vehicle out of view of the other patrons. In Canada, you would expect the clientele of such places to be Johns and prostitutes, but that is not normally the case in Central and South America. Here, these motels are often frequented by married couples who share their home with many generations and simply don’t have much in the way of privacy.

We arrived at the high gated lot of the motel, happy to have a secure place to store our truck for the night, as we had read many warnings about robberies on the coast of Peru. Our truck did not fit in the inner garage area, but the friendly owners were fine with us having our nose stick out for the evening. Karaoke music began playing in the late afternoon at a neighbouring fiesta facility, and we were serenaded until late in the evening by party goers crooning out favourites.(theirs not ours!)  All in all, we had a nice clean room, a comfortable bed, a hot shower and a tv, and it was a great break from sleeping in our camper!

We drove on along the coast the next day, making our way through the huge and congested capital city of Lima without incident. We stopped for the night at Rancho Grande, a little restaurant along the Pan-american highway south of Lima, run by a very friendly and welcoming Colombian family. We camped behind their restaurant for the night, and then had a hearty breakfast of fried pork ribs with the bacon attached, a fruit smoothie, fried plantains, a stack of toasted bread and a savoury salad, and, of course, coffee. The restaurant is a known stop over for overlanders, many of whom had signed a chalk board inside the restaurant. So many, in fact, that there was no room left for us to sign, and so the owner invited us to make some graffitti on the white walls that surrounded the property. Derek used his artistic talents to make this drawing, and the owner then sprayed it with sealer to keep the drawing safe from the weather.

It was a short drive the next day to Paracas National Park. We had read that the park “suggests that you leave you pets at home”, and so, with our home being our camper, we stopped a couple of kilometres before the park entrance and put Piper into the truck camper.

We entered the park, and a few kilometres later, let Piper out and back into the back seat of the pickup truck, telling her to “lay down, hide!”, anytime we were in an area of the park where a ranger might be lurking.

We found a great camping spot for the night and revelled in the seclusion the area offered. Soon after, however, a pickup truck pulled up, parked between us and the ocean, right in our view, and 5 or 6 local fishermen got out. These men hauled all types of shore fishing gear down the cliffs and fished for the entire night along the coast…we saw them return about 7:30 in the morning the next day.

We loved Paracas National Park, but we decided we should keep heading towards Cusco and the sacred valley.  We still had a lot of kilometres to drive to get there, and we have been feeling pressure to keep moving south to make sure we keep up with the season and make it to the southernmost part of Argentina and Chile during their summer months.  So we packed up and snuck Piper back out of the park.