Peruvian Shakes

Our last few days in Ecuador were spent in Vilcabamba, a scenic and somewhat hippy town near the Peruvian border. As Ari was still recovering from his concussion, Erica and I did a days horse trekking in the mountains. The scenery was beautiful, it was sunny, the guide was informative, the horse was probably the only thing that bothered me. It was scared of various things including dogs, moving things, red things, oh and Erica´s horse liked to kick mine but that was okay as long as I stayed in front. So we are walking along these fairly narrow mountain tracks when Dwendy (hmm...) catches sight of a mare in the field below that he quite likes the look of. They start flirting with each other and then Dwendy steps backwards into Erica´s horse and then off the path suspended between the rocks and the barbed wire. He was so still and had this glazed look in his eye, I did actually think he was dead. Anyway, the guide pulled me up and somehow managed to get the horse back up onto the path and we both got off lightly with a few cuts and bruises. After that I didn´t really have so much faith in the horse but we all made it back in one piece. The hotel we were staying in was a great little place called “El Jardin Escondido” and we had a little pool so Ari and I went for a dip (or rather a walk) in it after we got back. Ari seemed much better and unfortunately non of his inapropriate Spanish was lost as a result of the concussion.
We took a nightbus down to Peru-always nice to be woken up at 5am for passport control J-and ended up in Chiclayo, a fairly non descript town on the North coast. The first night we were sitting in our room and the whole room started to shake-needless to say we are all missing Japan, but an earthquake we could have done without. The first tremor lasted for about 2 minutes and scared us all to death! The earthquake measured in at just under 7 but fortunately the epicentre was way out in the jungle and we also realised that a lot of the buildings had earthquake secure signs. Good to know. We visited some ruins and tried chicha which is like a wheat beer although it contained no alcohol. I wasn´t a big fan. On the Peruvian beer front there are quite a few to choose from as many regions make there own beer. So far we have only sampled the Trujillan chopp (draft beer) and pilsen which are not bad and certainly an improvement on the Euadorian Pilsner. Next stop Trujillo.