March 30th, from Arica to Arequipa, Perú

We got up at a good hour and packed up, real exciting stuff. Our favorite nearby empanada shop was open and we got stuffed with amazing and cheap empanadas. Then, Pat had the idea that we all three split a giant ice cream cake. It was so unbelievably delicious that it almost dropped us into comas, and it was all the more rewarding because of the price: 1700 Chilean pesos, which comes to less than THREE dollars! Awesome. Our bus departed at 1:00 pm, so we checked out of the Residencial Real and took the one and a half mile walk to the bus station. Weird things happened when we got there. The lady that had sold us the tickets the day before was extremely nice and well-informed, and she instructed us to meet her at one at her ticket booth. However, upon arriving, a guy immediately singled us out and started telling us that he was our ride to Arequipa. He also had a cohort, and the way they immediately approached us and began to hurry us through the process of getting outside to the terminal seemed like a scam. I stood my ground and said, "no, we're waiting for the lady at 1:00," which made my distrust of the situation apparent to them. They seemed to not want us showing our tickets to the ticket counter in charge of the original lady's busses for the day, which further riled my suspicions. THEN, they said it was a car taking us to the Peruvian border, so we figured these dudes were trained to find dumb gringos and scam them. However, we talked to enough officials and ticket counter people and learned that the guys were actually on the level and that they knew who we were because of the nice lady's explicit instructions. So, much ado about nothing after all, but it's always best to be safe and certain.
Okay, so THEN we got all squared away and got our ride in a run down Chevy Caprice from a super nice chofer named Adolfo. He took us through all the customs and paperwork nonsense to a small city inside Perú called Tacna. There, we caught a bus and got our first taste of Peruvian money, called Soles (suns), Peruvian foods and Peruvian Spanish. Which, by the way, is WAY easier to understand than Chilean. The bus ride after that took about 6 or 7 hours, and basically sucked. The AC didn't work, so it was utterly stifling in the upper deck where we were. No joke, it was probably 100 degrees for the first two or three hours. Plus many needless stops, more luggage checks, rude cops, smelly passengers, a teenage idiot next to us with a myriad of annoying tics and habits, the inability to take our shoes off due to bus regulations, prohibition of eating on the bus (which we violated anyway), and the forced viewing of bootleg versions of all 3 The Mummy movies followed by The Scorpion King. I like the first two Mummy movies, but they were dubbed in crummy Spanish and blaring down on us from the nearby speaker. However, we had the front row, which entails a great view of the road in front of us and more leg room. We gutted it out and had some laughs, arriving finally at the Arequipa bus station at about 10:00 pm. Everything is SUPER cheap in Perú so far, and we each got a nice big burger for less than a dollar each and chatted it up with some cute bus attendant ladies hanging out. Although we preferred to walk, as we'd been sitting all day and also wanted to burn off the calroies from eating empanadas, ice cream cake, sweets, and burgers all day, a pushy taxi driver outside told us that it was kind of dangerous between the bus station and our hostal. So, fine, we paid him 4 Soles, and it's 3 Soles per US Dollar, and he took us to El Hostal Home Sweet Home. Hehehe. It's only 18 Soles a night including a breakfast of crepes, eggs, toast and coffee, and we've met some super cool people there already.