Heading Back Down

Alright so after Macchu Pichu we headed back to Cuzco with our french friend (there are so many french people down here by the way, a little less than half of the travelers that we´ve met have been from France, no joke). Sophia and Yanil stayed in Aguas Calientes to make some money waiting tables but it felt like the right time to all go our separate ways. After a night back in Cuzco we took a 10 hour bus to Arequipa, famous for being the most beautiful city in South America. It wasn´t all that great but we left our stuff at the bus station after buying tickets to the Peruvian border town, Tacna for later that night, and then met up with two of our Argentinian friends, Emiliano and Rama who were staying in Arequipa for a few days. We walked around the city all day, played a lot of music with these two guys (one from Columbia, one from Cuzco) throughout the day, had a really good apple pie thing, napped on the grass and read out loud, and then went to this really cool Alpaca museum where we saw the different kinds of Alpacas and Llamas used to make cloth, the different stages of sorting, cleaning and then the different natural spices, plants, urine, and BUGS (!) to dye the wool.
The ride to Tacna was uncomfortable and kinda confusing but what else is new. We crossed the border in the wee hours of the morning and got busted for bananas that we picked at Macchu Pichu and a few apples but we got the ginger back which has been a life saver with respect to the aweful Peruvian and Bolivian road work. So we spent that day in Arica, Chile which was completely grey and ugly when we arrived and turned out to be a very good feeling sunny beach town. By 9 oclock there wasn´t a cloud in the sky so we sat on the beach reading and playing guitar actually all day. We also spent a lot of time shell searching which was not hard at all. I´ve never seen a beach so full of tiny perfect colorful unsmelly shells. Also we were surrounded by (at one point) 16 great giant pelicans with incredible impressive wing spans and tolorance for standing on the same rock for hours and hours on end. It was pretty cool. We walked over to a more populated part of the beach where there was a huge blow up slide and quite an impressive playground. We also walked passed a dead seal with vultures going at it but I dont want to talk about that.
We took the bus that night to San Pedro de Atacama "directo" which turned out to be ridiculously un"directo." We stopped one: in the middle of the night to go through a check point where they kinda not really checked our bags for drugs..(we think??), two: really early in the morning when a bunch of people got off to change seats so that they didn´t have to heat the whole bus, three: at around 7 oclock to change buses altogether. Oy but we´re well practiced now and going to sleep where ever when ever what so ever.
San Pedro de Atacama is in northern Chile, in the middle of the dryest desert in the world, the Atacama Desert. Oh yeah that was yesterday. Wierd. So we played guitar on the street and made a little money, got gifted an onyx stone and met some really funny drunk homeless men. When we were playing guitar we met these two Chilean guys who we ended up spending the rest of the day and evening with. It was one of the guys birthdays so we went out into the desert, made a campfire, and drank too much Chilean wine. The birthday boy works as a chef at a fancy restaurant here in San Pedro so on top of that we had a fabulous pizza dinner acompanied by too many mojitos. We got back to the hostel, setting the alarm for early early the next morning to go....
TO THE CRAZIEST LAKES IN THE WORLD! Well that´s a little bit of an exaggeration but they were pretty frickin cool. We went with a tour and four Brasilians and got back this afternoon. We went to the first lake, Laguna Blanca which is just over the Bolivian border and had a great breakfast. Then while I was chasing a cat that looked fluffy I met this guy from Houston who had permantly terminated his college studies to go travel around the US. One day he decided he wanted to check out Tiahuana cause it was so close. And then he went a little farther (hitch hiking the whole way without any money) and a little farther and a little farther, making it all the way down to Tierra del Fuego. He´s traveling around in Bolivia now until his friend comes down in December with his boat and they´re going to go to Antarctica. Nuts. He was really nice and suprisingly normal for someone doing such a crazy trip. He definitely had his head on and it was great cause he wasn´t arrogant or annoying about it at all. Just a normal kid. After the laguna verde and natural thermal springs (perfect temperature) we headed back through the desert to Chile. We had an awesome grease fried free (which is ridiculously hard to find down here) lunch and then just chilled out in the hostel (and took a shower!).
So tomorrow we´ll walk around the desert and hopefully make our way to the Valle de Muerte and then Sunday morning we take a bus to Salta and from there we go straight down to lovely Cordoba. We´ll arrive the morning of the 26th, spend a few days in the city, a few days in the countryside and WE´RE BACK IN THE STATES!