6th March 2015 – Lima to Trujillo – 2015-03-13 12:54

Today we leave Lima for a 560 kilometer drive to Trujillo, but first we have to go to the US Embassy to collect our passports and hopefully our visas. Blue B kindly offers to wait for us about 30 kilometers out of town. When we arrive at the embassy at 9:50 am there are no lines of people as today is a half day and they don’t do interviews. We go straight to the window and are given a ticket to go through security and go straight to the patio window. We say hello to the girl who was working yesterday and she remembers us (we look a bit different to the Peruvians). We hold our breath as she takes our ticket and finds our passports, complete with visas. We’re good to go and it’s not even 10:30 yet, so back to the car and we start to work our way to the Pan American Highway north out of Lime. The traffic is hectic, there are 4 marked lanes on the highway and at one stage I count 6 lanes of cars all jostling for position, we’re surrounded by big trucks, it’s noisy with horns and people standing in among the cars selling drinks, car phone chargers, food, you name it.It takes us 1.5 hours to drive 30 kilometers to reach Blue B. We have a drink & driver change and we are back on the road, driving through the desert. It’s hot, there’s sand everywhere except when we get to a town where we see corn, asparagus, sugar cane and mangoes growing. We only stop for fuel, and driver changes, we eat and drink as we drive to make up time. We catch glimpses of the Pacific from time to time and we are rewarded with a magnificent sunset over the ocean. We arrive at our hotel at about 7:30 pm, where the rest of our group are sitting overlooking the swimming pool drinking Pisco Sours, they’ve only beaten us in by half an hour and they left the hotel at 8:00 am. We join them for a drink and a catch up and we all agree it’s been a hard day’s drive through the desert.