Huanchaco was just what we needed after such rubbish weeks on the road. The beach was lovely…(not sunbathing kinda beach but a wandering kinda beach) and the famous cigar shaped boats made with reeds, lined the walls through the town. Once we had finished our beers, showered and gotten over the nightmare drive we went exploring, relaxing and strolling along the fishy sand. We saw a group of 3 campers from France and had a small chat with them and found a really quiet place to sleep for the night. Although we had paid ($8) for a room it was a little bit too loud there so we used the room to relax, shower and blog and then drove to the far end of town to sleep.
Our first full day in Huanchaco was spent blogging, eating and preparing ourselves for the cheap cocktail night at the hostal!

We tried Pisco Sour which is a drink made with the local spirit (Pisco), lemon juice, sugar syrup and egg whites, decorated with angustoras bitters…3 drops to be precise! We tried a Maracuya sours each too and then headed out for a pizza where we were lucky enough to bump into 3 archeologists who were working in various ruins in the area. We asked them for their recommendations of which ruins to visit and told them all about our visit to Kuelap.
We strolled along the beach back to Peggy and watched a lady feeding baby (but HUGE) pelicans and crashed for some sleep back on the beach front.
We knew we didn’t have long to hang around in Huanchaco and set off the next day at lunch to go to visit Chan-chan, the largest Pre-Columbian city in South America….but on route we stopped at a HUUUUUGE supermarket to get some more salad! Ugh, we were so sick of eating salad that when we happened to find ourselves in a hardware store Alex decided it was time we sorted out our lack of gas situation. We were missing cooking and having the fridge soooo much, so Alex hatched a plan.
We decided to cut the main pipe to the fixed gas tank, attach a flexible hose and buy a gas tank to go under the bed. Sounds easy right?! Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahaaa!
Anyhoooo, we bought the pieces we needed, the flexi hose, several attachments, to make sure we had the right size and the gas valve…with difficulty of course, the store was a little like Toys R us where you pay for a piece of paper with a code and then go to collect the actual bits.
Alex rolled under the van to check which size valve we needed and we tried to return the others, which…of course…turned into a nightmare as the cashier had not scanned the correct piece of paper so our receipt was not for the pieces we had…trying to explain that this had all happened only seconds ago with basic Spanish was not easy so in the end I just said it wasn’t my problem and that I wasn’t going anywhere until I had my refund. It took 45 minutes to get the refund and sign 15 pieces of paper and even as we left the cashier ran after us to drag us back to the store to sigh yet MORE papers! I wonder sometimes why this kind of thing happens to us all the time, then I remember that I am of MY family…we attract trouble everywhere we go…why should Peru be any different?!
When we finally escaped with all of our nescessary pieces we asked a man in the carpark for directions to a garage and he was so kind and drove to the garage so we could follow him. This completely made up for the nightmare in the store!

At the garage they looked at us questioningly as we told them what to do but did it anyway and before long we had a connection for a gas tank!!! We went to the gas shop, bought a gas bottle and made a space for it under the bed. The gas man attached the valve, we checked the cooker worked and cheered when it did…we put the bed back together and went back to the supermarket to buy something other than lettuce!!!

We shopped for life and just an hour before closing time we made it to Chan-chan. It was huge, the site covers 20 square km and has some of the most amazing decorations over all of the walls. As we wandered around a large group of Peruvians rushed up to us and asked us if they could have their pictures with us! We stood and smiled for 10 minutes with every individual child, Mum and Dad and then as a whole group, it was really strange and we have no idea why they wanted pictures with US, but lovely to see all of the smiling faces. We waved our goodbyes and wandered the rest of the site (built in 850 AD) in peace discussing all the time what we were going to cook for dinner that night!

We left the amazing site as the sun dropped and squeezed in 200km before we stopped for the night at a petrol station, we were so tired that we just had asparagus, cheese and a pickled onion for dinner!

Without a doubt the scariest moment the next day was waking up to the smell of gas! Of course the gas valve we had bought was rubbish and leaked gas into the van all night long, luckily it had been so hot that we had slept with the windows open or goodness knows what would have happened!
We closed the gas valve and opened all of the doors and windows to get rid of the gas in the van. We drove until we found a gas shop and the ever helpful man tried several gas tanks and they all leaked. He sold us a new, safer valve and swapped our gas tank free of charge. We thanked him profusely and vowed to buy a carbon monoxide alarm as soon as we see one!

The new tank and valve is well fitted and does not leak even when rolled around, knocked or bumped and is totally safe Mums, Dads and friends! It is a little bit bodged but totally safe now so please dont worry…and of course, it means we have our fridge back which means we can go back to eating properly meaning no emaciated children to feed up when we visit!

We happily hit the road again to Lima, the largest city and the capital of Peru and even made it all the way to our prebooked hotel with ease using the tiny map…we are getting good at it…finally!
We parked up, excited to have a room to stay in (no camping facilities as you can imagine in the capital), Alex went in to check in while I packed a bag…he came back and told me they had not reserved our room even having received our booking!!! When will something go smoothly?
The hotel told us we could stay outside on the street in the van and use the reception toilet for the same price as the room!!!!!!! ($70 for 2 nights) We declined and complained to Booking.com and left in search of somewhere to stay!
We finally found a hostel and asked if we could pay to use the facilities but stay in the van…they said no, we had to stay in the dorm. We said okay then and they said we had to physically bring in our things to book into a dorm that we had no intention of staying in!
Why everything has to be so bloody difficult I have no idea.
We obeyed, collected our stuff, booked in, were shown to our dorm, paid and said a polite thank you and took our stuff back to the van!
Anyway, at least we had found a reasonable quiet street to stay on and had access to a shower and the internet for the night!

We sat in Peggy and calmed down a little bit and then emailed our friend on the ground in Lima, Luis Chiang-Chang Way. Luis is reputably one of Peru’s best photographers and we were soooooooo unbelievably lucky that he had agreed to take part in our adventure! We let him know we had arrived and where we were ‘staying’. He emailed us back with a huge, unexpected surprise and told us we were booked in to a gorgeous restaurant that evening at 9pm…as their guests!

We did a little jump around dance and showered and changed and got ready for our first night in Lima!!!

Find out what happens next on our travelling wedding adventure!