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Published: November 8th 2011
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Wed 19
We arrived in Arequipa and checked into the Wild Rover hostel (our third of the trip). We would have stayed somewhere a bit different, but i wanted the free t-shirt you get if you stay in all three. I wanted it bad.
After checking in, we simply chilled out by the side of the pool in the sunshine and sipped on some ice cold beer and for some reason, one of the songs from Ferris Bueller's day off was stuck in my head.
...OOOOOOH Yeahhhhh.
Thu 20
Early morning pickup for our Colca Canyon tour and suprisingly they managed to actually pick us up this time! (always a bonus). We piled in a minivan that was populated soley by tourists, wonderful stuff. The van drove for around half the day, stopping every hour or so and the tour guide shamelessly ordering us to get off and take photos. One fat jewish bloke decided after the 2nd stop that he'd had enough of the 'on the bus/off the bus´ game so he wedged his soft body firmly between the seat and the window and went to sleep. I saw him stir briefly
to eat one of the 6 snickers bars he had bought at the first toilet stop...6!!!
We stopped in a town for some lunch, but me Hazza and two other backpackers decided the place where the rest of the group was eating was too dear, so we found a cheap little place round the corner. After lunch we got dropped off at our hotels where we would be spending the night. Our group was scattered in lots of different hotels aroud the small town so the minivan driver had to do a little rat run around town to drop everyone off. We were the last stop. An hour after we got dropped off we got picked up again and did the same rat run around town picking everyone up and then heade to the hot springs.
The hot springs were OK, but they were pretty busy. There were 6 pools in total and after looking around at all of them we found the pool with the least amount of kids in it (and therefore with the least amount of piss in it). After the hot springs we did the rat run and were dropped off...15mins later we were
picked up again and did the rat run again to pick up everyone for dinner. Ridiculous. For dinner, we found our own place again because the one the group went to was too expensive. After dinner we went back to the restaurant to meet the group and sat there for 20 mins watching the tourist show the restaurant had put on for us. At one point this old guy from our group got pulled up to dance adn was dressed up as a Peruvian lady...the funny thing was that he actually looked like an old lady! was kind of freaky really. We eventually got taken back to the hostel and went to bed.
Fri 21
Early start at 5.00am and drove 2 hours in the van to the Condor lookout point. There...were...hundreds of tourists! And the shear mass of cameras with heniously large telescopic lens made it look like a photography expo at Earls Court! We, and the hundred other tourists, waited patiently for a Condor...but there was none. Diddley Squat.
Eventually the tour guide rounded everyone up and we started driving back home. We stopped briefly 2 mins down the road for a photo and out of the blue 2 Condors appeared! Sweet! We hopped back in the van and drove back to the village for lunch. After lunch we drove back to Arequipa. So all in all, we sat on a bus for two days and saw a couple of Condors...not the most exhilarating of trips.
In the evening we went to a chinese restaurant and got the largest serving of fried rice i think i have ever seen for 1 quid!
Sat 22
We evesdropped on someone's conversation (a fantastic past time of mine) and heard about a food festival that day serving traditional peruvian food. So, we hopped in a cab with one other bloke and a peruvian bloke who worked at the hostel and headed down there. Within minutes we had lost the peruvian hostel bloke and his sidekick (which was great because it meant we could take our time and do what we wanted). We spent a couple of hours walking, eating and drinking pisco sours and then headed home.
In the eveing we had some drinks in the hostel bar and got pissed up. Hayley went to bed, but i wasn't going anywhere becasue the rugby world cup final was on and i had found a nice Kiwi couple to cheer them on with. New Zealand won and we had a great night!
Sun 23
Hayley woke me up at 11am, and i felt ROUGH! Hayley said she wanted to change hostels because she really didn't feel comfortable in the one we were in. I was too hungover to discuss the situation so i quietly packed my bag and checked out. We got a cab across town to another hostel called 'Arequipay´. It was a really good hostel and had a fat TV, pool table, air hockey AND playstation 3! I sat in front of the playstation all day nursing my hangover. We got the biggest Domino's pizza i have ever seen for dinner...but it ended up feeding us for lunch and dinner the next day too it was so big!! We also watched the film 'The book of Eli´(which i had some issues accepting...did you know he was supposed to be blind!?...ridiculous).
Mon 24
We didn't get up to anything, and we just chilled out for the day. Stressfull stuff this travelling malark! LOL.
In the evening we shared a taxi with a swiss girl (who we didn't realise at the time, we were going to see everywhere for the next few days...like a ghost that was haunting us!!) and got a night bus to Nasca.
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