Day 415 – Guayaquil to Chiclayo to Lima
Ecuador to Peru Bus Ride
We woke up at the border between Ecuador and Peru in the wee hours of the morning. It was the same immigration office that we went through on the way to Ecuador (Day 396). The process to leave was simple, with the Ecuadorian Immigration Officer just checking our passport. Then we lined up at the Peruvian section and got our visa. This time we made sure to say the correct amount of time in Peru. We also checked the passport stamp before leaving. The process for the entire bus took less than an hour.
Chiclayo
We then continued towards the town of Chiclayo. The journey from Guayaquil took 15 hours in total. We arrived at the Civa bus terminal at 11:30am. From here we purchased tickets for the night bus to Lima leaving at 6pm. The tickets cost 70 PEN ($31.44 AUD) per person (p/p). We didn’t have any cash, so we had to find an ATM. Civa has a luggage storage service that we used for our large backpacks. The storage service cost 4 PEN ($1.80 AUD) for both bags.
On the way back from the ATM, we went to a Claro store to recharge our SIM card. We reused the SIM that we got the last time we were in Peru. It cost us 30 PEN ($13.47 AUD) to reload 3GB of data for 30 days.
After buying the bus ticket to Lima, we had lunch at a restaurant called Don Benny. From here we walked to the statue parks in Chiclayo. One of them is designed with Greek styled statues. We had walked past this park the last time we were in Chiclayo.
Then we walked a bit further to another statue park. This one was full of traditional statues from the region. It was really nice to see.
On the way back to the terminal we stopped at a coffee shop called Tostoa for some nice coffee and cake. We chilled around the terminal until our bus arrived. The 6pm bus arrived on time and we left 5 minutes later on our 13 hour journey.
The Civa bus was nice and within an hour we were provided with a surprisingly tasty rice and chicken dinner. Albeit small. We dosed off, watching Hollywood movies dubbed in Spanish.