---

---

Woah, what a week its been, travelling is hard work… since leaving home we have spent 70 hours on buses making our way from Buenos Aires, Argentina to Chile and up to where we wanted to be - Arequipa in Peru, but more of that later..

We spent a day in Washington whilst waiting for our next flight to Argentina. Got to see the White House, the president´s helicopter and George Town and had a good day walking around the very clean and sprawling city in the sunshine.

Next stop was Buenos Aires and a 22 hour bus ride to a small coastal town in Chile called Vina del Mar that was not much but Nick and I did enjoy watching the crab fisherman off the pier. The funny thing was that the fishhead bait was more successful at attracting a hungry sealion that was circling the pier rather than the crabs, much to the fishermans´annoyance!

After another mammoth 37 hours in buses and 5 cheese sandwich meals later (thats what they seem to live off here on the buses) we made it to Arequipa which is a beautiful town with narrow streets and a large plaza surrounded by two volcanoes. Apparently on our first day there was an earthquake at 11am (they happen all the time) but unfortunately we did not feel anything.

We spent our first day visiting museums and seeing a mummy that had been discovered in 1995 on top of one of the volcanoes in the area - it was a well preserved 15 year old girl that had been given to the Inca gods as a sacrifice, she looked a bit worse for wear but then who wouldn´t after 400 years in the snow!

Our next couple of days were spent in the Colca Canyon region where we got to see the majestic and HUGE condors soaring 5 meters above our heads. These birds are mammoth, they have a wingspan of up to 3m and are 1m tall - even though they are quite ugly they glide beautifully and it was pretty awesome to watch them circle above our heads. We also decided to be geeks and learn about the stars and planets on a trip to the observatory - the most amazing sight was seeing the moon through a powerful telescope as you could see quite a lot of detail including the craters.

The Canyon was ok but not that impressive, nothing like I imagine the Grand Canyon to be. Anyway we are off again to Ica. Hope everything is well with everyone at home, add a comment if you have time :)

---