I arrived in Arequipa at around 6 in the morning after getting a shockingly good sleep on the bus from Cusco. You can buy as much of a luxury ticket as you want, it's typically still hard to sleep on busses when you can feel them taking hairpin turns like the driver is auditioning for Fast and Furious 8: Peru Drift. In any case I managed a decent nights sleep and arrived in Arequipa feeling alive and alert enough to go on the free walking tour of the city that started at 10. This proved fortuitous since I met some friends there that I spent the rest of my time in Arequipa with.
Solo traveling is a lot like being a freshman the first week of college, everyone is so ready to make friends that it takes very little to decide to hang out together for several days in a row. At the hostel, I met one girl who was planning on going to the walking tour, so we headed over together, and by the time the tour had finished a couple hours later another girl had joined our friendship group and we had all decided to book an overnight trek to the Colca Canyon together. No need to take things slow. The trek left early - as in 3:00 in the morning early, so after taking the walking tour guide's advice to buy a cheap drink and watch the sun set over the plaza from a roof top restaurant, everyone headed to bed.
3:00 is a hard time to be awake and functioning, it's even harder when about 30 minutes into the drive your van breaks down and you have to wait for an hour and a half for a new one. Add this to the fact that the included breakfast was as my friend Chris put it, "crunchy air," aka one very airy roll, and the trip was starting to look like one of those kind of trips that while weren't very fun in the moment, would be laughed about hysterically later. Luckily things started looking up when we finally arrived at the Colca Canyon (or really still valley where we were hiking) and we met up with the rest of our group which included three friends I had done the Inca Trail with. We had established earlier that we were going to be in Arequipa at the same time and had arranged to be in the same group again for this trek. The scenery was beautiful and the whole group of 11 people clicked super well as we all headed down into the valley for the hike.
While remote, the valley isn't total wilderness and there's actually some small villages down there. We stopped for lunch at one place, then headed out to the very bottom where there was an oasis with a hostel where we'd be spending the night. Yes an actual oasis, something that sounds like it only exists in movies and books. It was very cool and after a quick swim in the pool pretty much just to say I'd done it (and also the showers were cold) we all turned in early because apparently that best time for hiking out of a valley is at 5 in the morning.
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| The oasis we hiked to |
After a strenuous hike out where I swore I was never hiking again, which of course I totally recanted about five minutes after I finished, we all piled back into the van to head back to Arequipa. We stopped at some typically tourist sights (nothing screams tourist more than a stop specifically designed to take pictures of alpacas) and our van didn't break down or need it's tires inspected once. Arriving in Arequipa, we had to once again face the weird backpacker reality of saying goodbye forever to people who you had just spent three days becoming close friends with. It's sad and seems vaguely unfair but that's the way it works. In any case I had a wonderful three days full of laughter and gorgeous sites so if a little sadness is the price to pay, so be it.
So that was my last stop in Peru. It still hasn't fully sank in that I've left the country, mostly because I have a bit of a cold and have spent 95% of my time in Bolivia so far inside the hotel room. I had an absolutely wonderful time there and feel like there's still way more I could have seen. Definitely highly highly recommend a trip there, it should be on everyone's travel bucket list. Next post will begin my stories about Bolivia!
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