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Monday, March 15th – Monday dawned bright and clear, but stepping out of our air-conditioned hotel room felt like stepping into a sauna. We poked around the town square for a few minutes, and bumped into one of the friendly customs guys from the border while I was taking a picture of a tree with weird tendrils hanging down with flowers on them, and pods the size of a large can o’ beans. We got rolling on the highway which ran out to the coast and through a lovely little seaside town, and we remembered how much we like the coast roads – we hadn’t been on a good coast road since the day we left San Jose in Costa Rica. And now we know: we want to ride in the mountains or on the coast, just not the inbetween bits. After a while, the road turned inland and headed due-south through a large desert via a couple of dusty towns. We spent all afternoon holding 70mph with a sandy wind gusting at us across the road, and after getting lost as usual in a large dirty town called Chiclayo, we started to look for the magical little seaside place to stop in – just like the one we’d seen that morning. As the sun was setting we found the La Estacion hotel in the little fishing town of Pacasmayo, and it was the perfect place to spend my birthday night. We had a really great fresh fish dinner at the hotel, and then took a contented evening stroll along the malecon and through the town

View from the terrace of the La Estacion

Coastal view somewhere in the north of Peru

Moe in the desert

120 mile road thru the desert, complete with sand dunes and gusty wind