On the road to Nazca

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Day 48-23rd October

Well blimey we were shattered! We had a bit of a lay in but had A) become very used to waking up at 05:00 and B) needed to pack and check out by 11:00 so we were up and eating brekkie by 08:00, boy did my shoulders, feet and knees hurt but it felt good to be on solid ground since I had spent the previous two days feeling like a monkey with vertigo, and one thing I can say about the point hostels is that the food is not arf’ bad! I forget the lady’s name who cooks at that hostel but she and her two boys are very nice and she makes a cracking scrambled egg, the only thing its missing is brown sauce.

Once we’d scoffed our breakfasts (I had two) we got our stuff together and put it in storage, we had a chat with the Irish girls about the buses as we were heading in the same direction and wished each other luck as the Cruz del Sur bus was full and both parties needed to find alternative transport... shouldn’t be too difficult we all thought.
Liz and I headed back to the main square to buy some bits we’d had our eyes on and thought we deserved a treat so we got there and bought some baby alpaca fur slippers that look hilarious and would give a spokesperson from P.E.T.A. a heart attack and cover us in paint but when we bought them we didn’t realise that they were the actual fur with the skin still attached, I just assumed they shaved it off and stuck it on to some funny shoes, oh well we have them now and they are so super warm and comfy I shall pretend that I was right all along and anyone who has no aversion to leather wouldn’t have minded... I have leather on my trainers sometimes... but then I don’t eat veal... anyway I’d better stop thinking about it... ehem. We also bought a vase, some pan pipes, a mask and some pressies for people back home then got a cab to the bus terminal.

We bought our tickets from the Flores bus station we’d been dropped off at when we had arrived in Arequipa relatively easily with much charades like miming and headed back to the hostel to wait it out until the bus was ready to leave that evening, the Irish group had had much the same experience and had booked themselves on to the same bus a few seats behind ours.

As we were waiting we had a couple of vodka and orange drinks and charged our i-pods etc as we were doing so we heard much hilarity and went to investigate... Tommy the resident (and it seems very lonely) rabbit was making bunny love to his pink and grubby looking stuffed frog toy and although I’m sure Tommy was working his magic in a very innocent way (I’m not sure a rabbit could really be classed as perverted) it was absolutely one of the funniest things we’d seen since being on the road and Tommy certainly didn’t mind having an audience... or pictures and video’s being taken so we gave him the nickname Tom Jeremy after the unlikely but famous and suitably moustached 70’s porn star mr Ron Jeremy.

In the evening we joined cabs with the Irish group and went to the bus station, we boarded our bus and found it smelled a bit like a poorly kept retirement home as the loo’s weren’t very clean but they put on a good film, Slumdog Millionaire which they played in Spanish (but with English subs after I asked) and I’d like to watch it again when we get home it wasn’t the girly and predictable drivel I had expected and I would highly recommend it. After a couple of smelly hours I put on the A-Team on my I-Pod and whiles chuckling away to myself at the episode where B.A. Barrackus tells Hannibal he doesn’t want any milk like a spoiled child I noticed out of the window that we were driving through a cloud and couldn’t see ten feet from the window, I’m not sure how the driver managed but we had no accidents and eventually I drifted off.

Ellz xxxx

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