Peru

Hi all, well we arrived in Peru safely yesterday at about 4pm, after a 9 hour bus ride!!
We caught it at 7am, it's the earliest we've been up since we finished work!!
They always have dodgy Spanish music playing full blast too which is not appreciated at that time in a morning (or any other time for that matter)
They did play a dodgy 80´s ballads CD at one point with some singers singing along badly to Chris De Burgh, Roxette etc!!
Ear plugs always come in handy on bus trips!!
It is red hot here as we are almost on the Peruvian coast at a place called Piura, the coast is the Peruvian Desert so you can imagine how hot it is, still after all the rain we had in Ecuador we're not complaining!!
We are here for one more night then we are back on the bus to a coastal resort where they have good beaches, it will be more like a holiday than travelling.
We are ready for a bit of R&R though as we have had a busy week on the buses getting from Quito to Peru.
The place we are at is really busy and it reminds me of Thailand (even though I've never been) there are 1000's of taxi's, those little motor bike ones, the roads are like Whacky Races and you need your wits about you when you´re crossing the road.
It seems richer than Ecuador and quite a few of the locals are a lot friendlier, although we have had some strange stares too, and we have only seen one group of Westerner's (some USA navy men, I dont mean navy in colour)
The border crossing was extremely straight forward despite all the horror stories we had heard and read, although we did chose the safest option after chatting to a few other people who had come from Peru to Ec.
The border officials have a sense of humour too which makes it a bit less stressful, we didnt have to pay any bribes either!!!
The drive from Ecuador into Peru was the most scenic we have had and it really is a beautiful country, despite the poverty.
If Ecuador got wise to tourism it would really improve their quality of life, as it is an amazing place.
You can all do your bit to help at home though by buying Ecuadorian bananas!! they are one of the country's BIGGEST exports (another been oil)
We went to the cinema when we were staying in Cuenca as we were fed up of walking round in the rain and were also soaked, we knew that there wouldnt be any English films but hey how difficult can it be to watch Spiderman 3 in Spanish!!
Anyway when we got there we were told that there was an English film just about to start!! so we opted for that, "Pathfinder" OMG it was garbage!! it was like one of Paul Deyes pirate copies, the sound was all warbled and the picture quality was awful, we were also the only people in there!!
We did get out of the rain for a couple of hours though, after that we went back to a really good bar that we found the night before, Eucalyptus, and dried out in front of their open log fire.
We blew the budget too and spent $17 on a bottle of wine which is cheap at 8 quid, but we had been paying $8 in other places which is only 4 quid.
For anybody who is wondering if Matt is still with me or if I'm on this trip alone (due to his lack of blogging) then don't worry he is fine, I keep telling him to get a post on, but he is too busy on messenger with his work colleagues!!!!!
So that's about it for now, were off into the town now, last night we went to an Italian that we had seen advertised on the back of a map that we had been given by the hostal, we asked 3 different taxi driver's if they could take us and nobody knew where it was, the 3rd one did drop us near it and we managed to find it round the corner.
Hopefully today we will find something more central and within walking distance!!
For anybody that has tried to text us since we left the USA, my phone hasn't been working in Ecuador due to some signal differences they have here that my phone is not compatible with, but it's working fine now were in Peru, so apologies for any unreturned texts!