18/07/2019 – Travel day to Mancora, Peru

We pulled into the Chiclayo bus terminal at around 05:30, earlier than scheduled, which would usually be a good thing, however this meant we had a long cold stopover in the terminal, awaiting our next bus. Bleary eyed we got ourselves into a little corner and dozed on and off for the next four hours, sat upright in cold hard plastic chairs, with the doors of the terminal wide open, we were freezing! At one point we got woken up by another passenger as I think he was confused as to why we had been there so long and was worried we had missed our bus! At 10:00 we boarded our bus to Mancora. We got ourselves tucked up again and both slept for the first three hours of the journey. We woke up to a rice lunch being served to us, which we gobbled up, absolutely starving! We watched some more Stranger Things, which is when Josh realised he had left his headphones and the headphone splitter on the back of the other bus. It will be the lucky day of the person who finds those headphones, they were posh B&O ones! Luckily he had some little in ear headphones so we put one pod in each and the time passed fairly quickly. We both had mega headaches from tiredness and dehydration so fell back to sleep again for a while. We pulled up in Mancora at 16:30 and breathed a sigh of relief. It is nice to be somewhere warm and also familiar! We got a tuc tuc across town to our accommodation, back in Las Bugambillias, where we have stayed many times before. We spoke to Virginia, our host, who feels like a friend now. As we were settling in Josh got a notification on his phone from the National Geographic, his photo of his brother Louis had been nominated and was in the top 12 photos of the day! He sent the link to lots of people on Whatsapp to ask them to vote for his picture, but is really pleased with being nominated in itself, as he should be. We walked into town and got a coffee and some supplies for tomorrow, before coming home and unpacking and showering. It felt so good to have a nice hot shower and get clean. Virginia made us dinner, beef saltado with rice mashed potatoes, peas and a delicious gravy. It was spectacular. We were served by her youngest son, Fausto. We chatted with them for a while before heading to our room to chill for a bit and get some much needed rest.