We officially arrived in Peru for the first time today, we actually had already been into Peru when we visited the Amazon but it's not so easy to get your passport stamped there. We spent over a month in Ecuador and again we enjoyed our stay there, for me it's not quite as good a place to travel as Colombia but that's largely due to it being considerably smaller and therefore the huge variety of geography etc in Colombia can't be matched. It would have been nice to spend a little longer in Ecuador so we could have explored a little more thoroughly but for the first time on our trip we've begun to look at the calendar and think we may need to gently get our skates on.

The journey from Vilcabamba to the border with Peru took us through the mountains and was as spectacular as the rest of the Andean routes we've taken. The border crossing was very straight forward, indeed the guy who checked our passports had to turn all the lights on to see the bus load of passengers through. Having crossed the border at about 8pm we reached the town of Piura at 10.30, there wasn't much to do so the 5 of us checked into a hotel along with Barbara from Austria who we'd met on the bus. We then went out for a Chinese which was surprisingly good and for once didn't play any cards.