Spoiling ourselves in Arequipa...

Talor: Arrived in Arequipa early in the morning after a nine-hour overnight bus ride. After two consecutive night buses, we were exhausted! Found a decent room at Hostal Tumi de Oro, with a nice rooftop lounge area. Got ourselves cleaned up, then spent the day walking around and doing a whole lotta nothing. I was happy to find Arequipa warmer than Cuzco, and Erik was happy to put on shorts and sandals, which he hadn't worn since Nicaragua!

The second largest city in Peru with all of the amenities we needed to spoil ourselves, we decided to stay for a couple of days to do just that. The next day, we checked into the Hotel Santa Teresa... three stars! It's actually a fairly new hotel that is trying to get clients in so we bargained hard and got a room for a third of their published price. Here are some of the luxuries: a firm bed AND a firm pillow, fitted sheets that stays on the mattress when you roll over, a flat-screen TV with a remote that actually works, a shower with great water pressure, a toilet seat, and even hot water coming out of the sink! There's also wi-fi and a telephone, not that we have anybody to call, but we could if we wanted to without leaving the room! And did I mention it includes breakfast with eggs? But strangely, I find myself missing the old, run-down, characterful rooms we've been staying in...

With our visa about to run out in just a few days and ready to leave Peru, we decided to splurge away... treated ourselves to an expensive, but absolutely yummy, square pan-pizza that could compete with any thin-crust pizza shop in New York, indulged in a delicious mixed seafood ceviche with fresh sea urchin (wow, haven't had sea urchin since we left home), and even had French, German and Turkish food too. Then we visited a very cool, very lovely convent/museum/mini-city with a $10 entry fee, without batting an eye! We are living large!

But after seven weeks in Peru, we were ready to move on and head to Chile for warmer climes and something different. Unfortunately, Peru wasn't quite ready to let us go... yet another strike on the road to Tacna, the border to Chile! Damn, what luck! Our two-day stay has turned into five and now we're having to resort to Plan B, which was our original Plan A when we were in Cusco, head to Puno and cross over into Bolivia...

Erik: Talor forgot sipping French wine while watching a performance of “Carmen” in an old monastery. (Having lived in Paris, New York and San Francisco for so many years, I'm quite embarrassed that my first opera is a free show in Arequipa, Peru!) Our Halloween plans didn't quite pan out – the street party we'd been told about was too popular. We couldn't move, couldn't get into bars to have a drink, and definitely couldn't enjoy ourselves. Found a nice quiet bar on a sidestreet and laughed at the fact that we were celebrating Halloween in Peru by sipping Cuba Libres (rum & cokes) at a French Bistro – so it was an early evening. It is peculiar just how popular Halloween is here – earlier in the evening the streets were filled with kids in costume trick-or-treating. It was fun to see, but odd at the same time.

It's comically aggravating, or perhaps sadly comic how these Peruvian strikes are seemingly following us around, preventing our exiting the country while the days left on our visa tick away (only 2 more, now.) So we close the circle of our escape route by heading to Puno tomorrow, where we can hopefully catch another bus directly to the frontier, then on to Copacabana, Bolivia on Lake Titicaca. Wish us luck!

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Arequipa, Peru