Here we come Peru!

Saturday 07 April 2012

The taxi we booked yesterday collected us from our hotel around 09.20am (only 20 mins late), and we were in Tacna, Peru by 11.00am Chilean time, which is 09.00am Peruvian time. Peru is 2 hours behind Chile (normally only 1 hour) as it doesn’t do daylight saving, Chile is still on daylight saving until the end of April.

According to the LP we should have had some of our stuff stolen at Tacna bus station. Didn’t happen! We bought a couple of bus tickets to Arequipa. We had a short wander through the streets of Tacna in an effort to find the city centre, we couldn’t find it and it was about 33C. Didn’t help that we headed off in the wrong direction, going north instead of south. We got confused and were thinking of another city, we didn’t have a map either. So we went back to the bus station and had an early lunch, read our book and waited for the bus. Tacna isn’t a particularly beautiful city.

We booked the nice comfy big seats on the bottom level where you have lots of leg room, the seat reclines about 140degrees and there are only about 12 people. It costs twice as much as the top level/cattle class/classic, but is still only about AUD$15 each to go 6 hours.

The hotel we’ve booked in Arequipa must be a bit posh (US$80 per night) as they asked for our flight details as they have a pick-up service as part of their deal. They asked what our flight details were. We told them which bus we were coming in on and they were there to collect us. Easy-peasy.

Before dinner we went for a stroll around the main city plaza (Plaza de Armas) and surrounding streets. Gosh this city is pretty. It is an old Spanish colonial city and many buildings are made out of the local volcanic rock which is very pale, thus the Arequipa is called ‘The White City’.

Dinner eaten, need sleep.