Don't mind the dirt, It's just a landslide.  

So let me ask you this, when you jump a bus, or omnibus as Ecuador's locals call it, and you´re told it will take a mere three hours to make your destination (let´s call the destination Vilcabamba) when do you expect to arrive at said destination? If you answered three hours more or less you were WRONG!!

Traveling through South America can be difficult at the best of times but after having already spent four months on this wild and spectacular continent I thought getting off the beaten track to make the crossing from Peru into Ecuador would be well within my abilities and as such I accepted the challenge to enter Ecuador via the small town of La Bolsa. So how do you get to La Bolsa? With great difficulty!

The day started at 7.30am in the tiny Peruvian town of Jaen . It was here I hopped a three hour mini bus containing 26 people with no seat padding to another even tinier town where a connecting motocarro (think motorbike with a two person back seat) whisked me away to a small shed containing seven people watching some of that ever wacky Peruvian television. One glance of the newly arrived westerner and everybody's up and happy. It seems I make up the final number needed to get the next mode of transport on the road. Good timing on my part so I start loading my stupidly heavy bag into the back of a Corolla station wagon...hold up, didn't I just say seven people waiting? That's right, eight of us are squashed into a Corolla station wagon to drive a further three hot, humid and sweaty (let me tell you here that four grown human beings in the back of a car make a lot of sweat together) hours through the Amazonian jungle cum Andean mountain terrain of uppermost northern Peru. A brief moment before we almost pass out from heat exhaustion the driver turns down the very loud oh-la music and me and my stupidly heavy bag escape the stupidly overcrowded car and take a look around.

La Bolsa. A town half in Peru , half in Ecuador and wholly in spectacular surrounds. La Bolsa is home to a technology free immigration office, thirty shack style homes (four of which sell food that even the most ravenous of Australian girls simply must refuse) and two pubs. And here I wait, and wait, and wait until some four hours later a truck with unpadded wooden seats offers to take me a further two and half hours to Zuumba.

It's now 9pm , I'd been on the road thirteen and a half hours and was now a mere 200km as the crow flies from my starting point, and this is where the trouble begins.

After waiting three hours my bus to the very beautiful valley of Vilcabamba (the valley of longevity where people commonly live until well into their 100´s...if they survive the drive there) arrives. The seats are padded, the windows are clean and all seems right with the world until some forty minutes into the three hour bus journey we are faced with a small problem, a landslide. The men get out, they make a fuss and after fifteen minutes of chest puffing an older gentlemen shifts a big log and the bus turns four wheel drive and goes right over the top of the landslide. Great! I had read that travel through Ecuador  can be held up by landslides during the wet season but this didn't seem like too much of a problem.

So the wheels on the bus went round and round for a further fifteen minutes until on go the breaks, we had found another landslide. This time the older gentlemen is no use, this one needs shovels but to have shovels in the back of a bus during landslide season would be way too organised so we´re informed that we must spend the night in the bus. Okay then, it's not where I had expected to stay the night but when you're traveling on a budget a free night's accommodation must be taken for what it is. Of course I can't help but think that my bed would have been far more comfortable if only the driver had packed some shovels before he left.

Next morning, I wake late (around 6am ) to find most of the other passengers have left. So off I jump and oh what a sight to behold. Seems our little ´just shovel it off´ landslide isn't a concern at all for when I walked around the next corner, I find the grand daddy of landslides. For fifty metres up and across plus a further 100 metres below the road a massive slice of the mountain had come a cropper. This was some serious landslide action! I was at a loss, the next ´town´ was up to 5km away and with a 23kg backpack walking that distance uphill wasn't too inviting. After an hour of gathering my thoughts I return to the bus and am informed that a tractor was on the way and it would only be another hour until we turned on the ignition again

The bulldozer came an hour later and in forty minutes the road is cleared. I'm not feeling brilliant about crossing a landslide but staying where I am is a far less attractive prospect. And so the wheels on the bus go round and...we turn a corner and find an even bigger landslide. This time we're faced with mud and trees flowing down the road for at least 30metres. So we wait another hour or two for the bulldozer to return and a further thirty minutes while it pushes the mud, trees and other wet season debris down the street. From this point around seven buses had lined up in convoy and the tractor took lead. And good thing it did for this was the day of a thousand landsides, well at least of ten landslides! That's right, we came up against a further eight major landslides, some of mud, some of rocks, some of wet sand plus countless minor ones causing the extension of our three hour bus ride to become a 23 hour white knuckle event. Finally, at 8pm of the following evening we arrived at our destination and believe me when I say if money had allowed, the fear of landslides would have certainly kept me there forever.