It was almost surreal how the vegetation and landscape changed from one side of the border to the other. Peru was dry and Ecuador was suddenly green. We spent a few hours weaving our way through bustling market streets with our windows tightly shut (as suggested in our guide-book) in search of the customs office. We’d signed out of Peru but never signed in to Ecuador. They were building a new customs office of sorts but hadn’t quite finished yet and since it was weekend, the guys who usually sit in the road directing vehicles to the old border post, weren’t there. We also met an interesting couple from Colombia. They were traveling down on two motorbikes and had also spent a good chunk of their evening in search of customs in order to leave Ecuador.
We eventually found the old customs office and some grumpy old man working there wasn’t going to listen to a young woman and ordered me to wait outside the office while James tried to explain in his broken Spanish that although it looked like we were going from Ecuador to Peru, we were actually trying to find customs to get IN to Ecuador with the necessary paper work for our van. I got chatting with a young man outside who seemed to have a good understanding of what was going on. He listened to me and suddenly shouted to the old man inside “they’re looking to get IN to Ecuador. He then hopped in the car and took us to the Ecuadorian customs office in the middle of town jammed between two little shops on the corner of a dodgy-looking street. They were out of ink so we had to take the officer to an internet café so he could print out our document (which we obviously had to pay for) and only then were we officially in Ecuador.
