About Me

I ramble about a number of things - but travel experiences, movies and music feature prominently. See my label cloud for a better idea. All comnments and opinions on this blog are my own, and do not in any way reflect the opinions/position of my employer (past/current/future).

10 January 2008

Trujillo to Chachapoyas

There are two roads to Chachapoyas - the first is a really picturesque dirt road over some spectacular mountain passes and the other, is a mostly tarred road, over lower mountain passes, which is not as spectacular. Normally, the latter route can be done in about 14 hours by bus. The more scenic route, even though it is shorter in length can take over 2 days, and there are no direct buses. If I had the time, I would have taken the first route. If I could foretell the future, I would have also taken the first route.

Early in the morning, there was a rock slide which caused an accident on the road - a bus was "swept" away by the rocks into the valley below. People died, I am not sure what the casualties were. I don't know much about the accident except that I was lucky in not being in that bus, which was not far ahead of my own bus. I was asleep at the time, and only heard about the accident later. That was only the first delay.


The second, longer delay happened only an hour later, when another landslide completely blocked the road, coupled with a river that had burst its banks about 2 Km earlier. It took about 5 hours to clear the road, and quite amazingly the buses used a pedestrian bridge to cross the river ... which looked at times that it would collapse.





We then stopped in a town called Pedro Ruiz, not far from Chachapoyas, where we were told by the bus company, Movil Tours (rated very reputable by many in Peru) that we would only continue our journey in about 4 hours time. We weren't told of the reasons, but I assumed it had to do with driver fatigue etc. However 4 hours passed, and there was no sign of the drivers, and after almost 6 hours, the drivers pitch up. We then learnt that the road to Chachapoyas is closed in the morning for road works, and thus the delay. This off course infuriated all the passengers since the company had not actually informed anybody about this problem - and people could have found a lot of other things to do rather than sit around in the bus terminal.


That said, after a day of accidents and rockfalls, I was glad to reach my destination safely.

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