There were 6 Special Stages at Lima the next day. The first stage accounted for a lot of damage to many cars, and once again the Hall’s Volvo, a sort of uncontrollable missile which they had fittingly christened ‘Bronco Billy’, had bounced out of a crater hurtling itself into a rock-face chopping off the passenger door-handle and fracturing, though not breaking, a front wishbone. The second Special Stage brought the end of the Healey as it sucked pounds of sand into its carburettor intakes, the result of an earlier fire which had incinerated its filters, and the end of the Lima Special Stages as a girl had been injured on the beach section, strolling into the path of a Canadian driven Datsun 510.The driver was held by the police, and was effectively out of the rally. The Healey was following in the footsteps of the Rover 2000, which had done much the same thing earlier with a sand-damaged engine. This malady also got the better of Hector and Natalie’s Porsche, which finished its rally on the way to Lima. The worst news at Lima was that Bill and Eileen’s1929 Chrysler 77, though going superbly when we had passed them on the way in, had developed a slipping clutch as the rear main bearing oil seal failed.
Departure from Lima to Piura was early and it was sad leaving Bill and Eileen who were obviously stranded. We had been travelling together and had done the worst of the journey, and would miss them from now on. This was a day for drivers and we would have to do more than 621 miles but it was all on superb tarmac, the Panamerican Highway at its best. The going was mostly flat and straight allowing us to cruise comfortably in the 80s. The Aussies, Les and Gordon, scorched passed us with a metallic crackling from the twin exhausts of their fastback Boss Mustang soon to disappear over the boundless horizon. This was amazing, as we had written them off twice already on account of their problems with the Mustang’s suspension.
Piura has a lovely old Colonial style of Spanish architecture developed for coolness in those early days before air conditioning. The hotel rooms had high ceilings from which were suspended large slow moving fans, the courtyard had an elegant tastefully designed swimming pool with a little island supporting tropical trees and flowers. Around the pool and under verandas dinner and breakfast would be served. Our cars were guarded in the local army barracks under the surveillance of very heavy purposeful looking machine guns nested at the entrance. This was the Peru we had imagined, not that desert wasteland of the south but the sub-tropical jungle scenery with the picturesque little terracotta villages tucked in valleys. Tomorrow we would be in Ecuador and crossing the troubled border where skirmishes had taken place recently.
Ecuador was another of those countries which, by its name, we had assumed would be a lush tropical jungle paradise with Victorian overtones. It probably was but now there was little left which would bear testimony to that arboreal splendour. The roads were rather good though such presumably good quality roads and attendant infrastructure have to be paid for with the natural resources the country is endowed with. Our road running up from the southern border to Cuenca and then on to Quito the capital, was mainly high up in the mountains, though when travelling through the valleys we felt as though we were driving through the foothills on the French side of the Pyrenees; strange that we were now almost bang-on the Equator and there seemed no sense whatsoever of an Equatorial lifestyle.
The departure from Quito to Cali in Columbia was early with the first car going out at 6.01am and the Special Stage was a winding cobbled road finished like an old Roman road would have been. It was bumpy and overgrown and looked very narrow as it wound its way up and down the mountainsides and would last for just short of 15 miles. The acute hairpin bends had been put in without cobbles and were effectively soft sand pits which I am sure was a deliberate technique to slow the traffic down as, believe it or not this was once the main road, the Ecuadorian Pan American Highway, up until 1970 carrying two way-traffic!
With branches scraping both sides of Hero we carefully picked our way along what was the most beautiful road we had seen in Ecuador and as we were about the last, we took our time greatly admiring the scenery when suddenly a polite hoot announced the arrival of the Russians in their Moscovitch. Pulling over as best we could they rocketed past on the 1 in 3 downhill descent dislodging some granite cobbles and swaying dramatically. Sometime later at the Colombian border they came in to line up behind us with a smashed windscreen and the panelling along the entire left side of the car severely damaged. Apparently, after overtaking us they had hit one of those sandpits on the apex of a hairpin and being unable to slow down – their brake pads had been completely worn out 2,000 miles back in the High Andes – they had no option but to yank the steering wheel and hope for the best, which turned out to be not so good. We must have passed their wreckage hidden in the undergrowth and come to think of it, I do remember some broken saplings near a bend; they were pulled out later with the aid of the Officials’ 4-wheel drive. They were extremely tough but despite their toughness they were to disappear without trace within the next couple of days.