PERU: Like Margate, but colder

I´M AT: Casa Suiza, Huanchaco, nr Trujillo. The loo flushes only occasionally,and there´s no breakfast, cos the kitchen´s being redecorated. But it´s near the beach and only $5 a night with private bathroom.

AND LO - here I am in Peru.

First impressions are that it´s an awful lot more dirty, noisy, and chaotic than Ecuador. I feel I´ve been thrust into a tatty blender.

Border crossing was quite a laugh, once we´d stopped batting away the mosquitoes. The Ecuadorian side was fine - all official and pretty quick. But once we´d walked over the dirt road and under the Bienvenidos Peru sign, our days of ease and grace and sweet air were over. The border guard´s concrete outpost was black and empty, and the bus was humming with a waiting engine, so a bunch of locals from the bus walked up and hammered on the door, rang the buzzer, shouted, tapped keys on the window. Nothing happened. Dark and humid, and food for buzzing creatures. Cockroaches and crickets, rolling like dark treacle on the tarmac. Until - by the light of a candle and bleary-eyed, the guy, about 50, crumbling like a digestive, took his place behind the immigration desk, and with rusty stamp imprinted our passports, eyes winking through bottle-bottom glasses, laughed that my name is King, and squattly wallowed in his dirty tracksuit. I could quite easily have handed him a pencil portrait enscribed on a crisp packet and received his blessing.

So we moved on and into the night.

The route from Ecuador took us from Loja over the border to Piura, in Northern Peru. Little to detain us there so on, through a very bleak, white-yellow desert, concrete houses without roofs, to Chiclayo, another change of bus and on to Trujillo. Helpfully, the local beer is called Trujillo, so with an advertiser´s handclap we poured ourselves off and into the afternoon, a taxi straight to Huanchaco which the guide called a ´relaxing surfer´s paradise´.

It was like Margate, only colder. A ramshackle pier, chipped surfboards, sweet carts and their owners ambling around on faded pink conrete. Large orange sandwiches of waffle and toffee. Fish restaurants closed for the low season. Glistening grey sky.

Anyway we dropped anchor at the hostal and changed, went out for beer and food, got a taxi back into Trujillo, went to a club (naturally), and came home the worse for wear, a few pennies shorter and with aching backs, to rest our toes in the freezing coast.