Peru - Part Two

We start where we left off earlier: The bus ride to Arequipa. This wasn´t too exciting except that again there were more bus lies. I was once again told I was on a cama and got semi-cama. At least now I had company though was able to sleep for most of the ride. Again we arrived at ridiculous o´clock though the hostel was expecting me at this time. We managed to sleep some on arrival and woke later in the morning to go and explore the town and arrange onward tours and travel.

Arequipa is a really pretty town with a lovely Plaza de Armas (every town in South America seems to have one of these). The plaza is surrounded by gorgeous white buildings with arched fronts. Heading away from the plaza things become a little more bleak but Kelly and I did manage to get to the Monastery which was absolutely gorgeous. It´s like a mini city (I believe this is also referred to as a citadel) and when you´re in it it´s hard to believe that there´s a world outside of it. The buildings remind me a lot of what I imagine the mediterranean would be like with terracottas, whites and blues, and murals in the small squares. If you ever go to Arequipa it´s a real must to see though time is required...it took the both of us about two hours to see it all.

That night we met Frank and Miriam, others from our Peru Treks group, at what is supposed to be Peru´s best pizza joint. The pizza was good but can´t say for sure that it´s the best, particularly as I was sick later that evening! I have to say though, I couldn´t have asked for better company. It was an early evening though in the end as we were being picked up for our Colca Canyon day tour at 2.30 in the morning! Ouch. Fortunately my belly was ok by then. The trip itself was nothing really worth writing about. A lot of driving though we were really lucky and saw loads of Condors. They put on a good show for us, flying close overhead and in front of us. What magnificent birds! On route back to Arequipa, we were supposed to stop at the hot springs though didn´t which was poo. It was apparently too hot. We did stop at a town though where we were able to do the tourist thing and have our photos taken (for a small tip) with tame eagles and llamas. Yay.

On returning to Arequipa, the three of us hot-footed it to the bus station so that we could get to Huacachina, a small lagoon town just outside of Ica, 4.5hrs south of Lima. This was a really nice spot to just chill and have chocolate brownies and the local Hostel International. We also did some (more) sand boarding though the sand boarding here was loads better than the boarding in San Pedro de Atacama. This was because the dunes were much bigger and we did more of them rather than the one run over and over. We started on baby dunes and worked our way to bigger and bigger ones. We also did a bit of dune buggy-ing which was wicked. Loads of adrenaline pumping fun.

Huacachina was my last stop in Peru before taking the never ending bus journey from there to Quito in Ecuador. I left Huacachina at 11am on Thursday morning, taking one of the regular buses to Lima. There were no promises made for this bus so no promises broken. However, I was on a pretty tight schedule as my onward bus from Lima to Quito was due to leave at 5pm and I needed to be there an hour before. The Ica-Lima bus generally takes 4 hours though mine was a little longer given we had a flat. Great. Oh well, I made it on time so no harm done. Little did I know though that this was going to mark a trend for the rest of the journey. We left Lima late and were supposed to arrive in Quito at 2am on Saturday morning. This was not the case due to stopping multiple times so that the bus driver could tinker with a seemingly working motor. One stop was over three hours at the Tumbes bus station where we were effectively locked in with no food or water and we had to pay for the bathroom, no matter how many times we needed it. We eventually arrived in Quito at 2pm (12 HOURS LATE for those too lazy to work out the math) and unfortunately by this time I´d missed getting to the Otovalo markets. But Ecuador is another story for another time...