Back to town...

---

We get on the 9am bus outta dodge (can´t believe we made it out the canyon so early...was expecing to be on the midday bus), back along the canyon lip to Chivay...a town famous for their mineral laden hot springs, where we plan to spend a day soaking our weary bones. Along the way our bus stops for a few minutes at the tourist trap Cruz del Condor. People in tour-buses pay big dollar to stand at a lookout spot with a few hundred others in the hope of seeing the condors that nest in this part of the canyon. Amazingly, sat in our seats on the bus looking out of the open window, we get lucky and within seconds we get a free show from 2 huge condors flying low, unfortunately my camera isn´t good enough to do them justice but it´s a hell of a mental image. Some people pay and wait for hours and never see a thing, so we feel very smug. Condors are the world´s biggest birds with the males´wingspan reaching up to 3 mtrs! They are pretty ugly but seeing them soar on the thermals is beautiful.

In Chivay we soak our limbs in the hot springs which feels like heaven, have an amazing dinner (or it could´ve been average...3 days in the great outdoors seem to heighten the senses!) and sleep like babies for almost 12 hours in the most comfortable bed we´ve had in Peru so far. Yay! All well earned and very much appreciated.

In the morning we head back to Arequipa and spend a few hours killing time in the market getting some supplies before our overnight bus journey to Cusco...no more Cruz del Sur food for us! We also go to a bodega to taste some of Peru´s finest ´wine´...the lady is more than generous and we try about 20 different labels...it´s all varying degrees of nastyness but we finally settle on a bottle of strawberry-ish flavour paint stripper and merrily wander to the bus terminal and our journy to Cusco and Machu Picchu beyond. It´s weird that neighbouring Chile and Agentina make such brilliant wine and yet Peru are so far off that I struggle to even class it as wine. Maybe I´m missing something and the good stuff is kept away from the gringos. I promise to do more important research in this area 😉

Funny...our names are never quite what they should be on bus tickets etc, but Ritch decides he quite likes being Richard Aerosmith and the guy at the bus check-in thinks it totally rocks yeah!

---