Leaving Chile for Peru was an interesting experience. The most hassle free way to cross the border from Arica to Tacna (the most southerly Peruvian town) is apparently to travel by collectivo. This has a few advantages over buses – mainly that they actually wait for you if you get held up with border bureaucracy… rather than continuing on with all your luggage as you struggle with limited Spanish and a sullen border guard! These ‘taxis’ aren’t great though – ours was about 20 years old, had the reassuring ‘No Fear!’ logo plastered across the top of the windscreen, and like all the others, refused to leave Arica until full (i.e. crammed with 5 passengers and twice the car’s weight of luggage balanced precariously on the roof). Still, we made it to Tacna without too much trauma or border queuing, and even managed to locate the bus terminal from which we could move on to Arequipa, the city where we hoped to spend our first nights in Peru.
This is of course where we hit our first snag. We’d got up before dawn broke (about 6am Chilean time), but waiting to fill up the collectivo took time, driving and border crossing more time… so that when we reached Tacna it should have been about 10.30am. Which is when we discovered one of the odd things about this part of the world. Although Chile and Peru are on more or less the same longitudinal axis, Peru is 2 hours behind Chile. Weird! We think Chile has is wrong here – even Bolivia which is East of Chile – is 1 hour behind Chile. Meaning Chile is only 3 hours behind the UK, and that the sun rises remarkably late there. Anyway, as a result we found ourselves stranded in the manky bus terminal in Tacna at 8.30am in the morning, with the next bus to Arequipa leaving at 12.30pm. Over 4 hours to kill to a 6 hour bus journey after convoluted border crossings… oh joy.
We tried to have a look at Tacna’s town centre. This was OK I suppose, except that we set off in the wrong direction, fully laden with all our rucksacks in the heat of the midday sun! Argh. Our Spanish is improving, but it’s not great – a helpful bloke at the bus terminal assured us it was only a 10 minute walk away and gave us directions. Unfortunately the Spanish for ‘right’ is damn nigh identical to that for ‘straight ahead’… you get the drift! When we eventually found the main plaza it was very pretty and lively, but we were half dead and happy to collapse into a nearby internet café. After a while we staggered back to the bus terminal for a long wait made to seem even longer by the cat-calls of various ticket touts. One man and woman were particularly skilled at competing in this – they’d yell ‘Arequiparequiparequiparequipa!!!’ break-neck speed as loud as they could every 10 seconds or so. The man was louder, but he couldn’t match the woman for fitting-as-many-syllables-as-possible-into-each-second! To my ‘delight’ Gary thought he’d have a go at out-pacing them (fortunately at a low volume) – he couldn’t come close!
So we killed a few hours staring in fascination at the women in full and highly unflattering traditional dress: apron, HEAVEY skirts (serious amounts of fabric to make their bottoms look as large as possible), tights, twin pigtail plates, all topped off with a bowler hat! As seen in the photo. Eventually we did manage to catch the bus, but only after messing around with numerous luggage and ticket booths, and an irritating unannounced and unmarked departure tax (in a tiny unnoticeable booth on the far side of the terminal).
But this seemed to be a reasonably good work up to travelling around Peru. The bus journey itself was barmy! This wasn’t the company’s fault – they were fine – but the bus seemed to be stopped every 10 minutes for some vehicle check or another. Sometimes all the passengers were herded out, told to get their luggage, then told to leave their luggage, and finally made to walk through a random customs-like building while the bus was driven all of 10 m along side, before being allowed to get back on. Most often we just sat in the bus as the driver talked to the various Police officials for 10 minutes or so. Once however we all had to surrender our passports to a Policeman who came on board. Disconcertingly he vanished off the bus with them, but thankfully returned 10 minutes later and gave them all back. We haven’t a clue what these checks are meant to achieve – if they wish to monitor the movement of people here it’s pretty futile as most of the cars passed through these checkpoints completely unmonitored.
Anyway, we did finally reach Arequipa, and we were relieved to find it a very pleasant city. We are presently checked into a nice hotel on the beautiful Plaza de Armas – but I’ll talk about that in the ‘Arequipa’ post on the www.catch-up-with-the-sun-southamerica.blogspot.com page in a few days time!
This is of course where we hit our first snag. We’d got up before dawn broke (about 6am Chilean time), but waiting to fill up the collectivo took time, driving and border crossing more time… so that when we reached Tacna it should have been about 10.30am. Which is when we discovered one of the odd things about this part of the world. Although Chile and Peru are on more or less the same longitudinal axis, Peru is 2 hours behind Chile. Weird! We think Chile has is wrong here – even Bolivia which is East of Chile – is 1 hour behind Chile. Meaning Chile is only 3 hours behind the UK, and that the sun rises remarkably late there. Anyway, as a result we found ourselves stranded in the manky bus terminal in Tacna at 8.30am in the morning, with the next bus to Arequipa leaving at 12.30pm. Over 4 hours to kill to a 6 hour bus journey after convoluted border crossings… oh joy.
We tried to have a look at Tacna’s town centre. This was OK I suppose, except that we set off in the wrong direction, fully laden with all our rucksacks in the heat of the midday sun! Argh. Our Spanish is improving, but it’s not great – a helpful bloke at the bus terminal assured us it was only a 10 minute walk away and gave us directions. Unfortunately the Spanish for ‘right’ is damn nigh identical to that for ‘straight ahead’… you get the drift! When we eventually found the main plaza it was very pretty and lively, but we were half dead and happy to collapse into a nearby internet café. After a while we staggered back to the bus terminal for a long wait made to seem even longer by the cat-calls of various ticket touts. One man and woman were particularly skilled at competing in this – they’d yell ‘Arequiparequiparequiparequipa!!!’ break-neck speed as loud as they could every 10 seconds or so. The man was louder, but he couldn’t match the woman for fitting-as-many-syllables-as-possible-into-each-second! To my ‘delight’ Gary thought he’d have a go at out-pacing them (fortunately at a low volume) – he couldn’t come close!
So we killed a few hours staring in fascination at the women in full and highly unflattering traditional dress: apron, HEAVEY skirts (serious amounts of fabric to make their bottoms look as large as possible), tights, twin pigtail plates, all topped off with a bowler hat! As seen in the photo. Eventually we did manage to catch the bus, but only after messing around with numerous luggage and ticket booths, and an irritating unannounced and unmarked departure tax (in a tiny unnoticeable booth on the far side of the terminal).But this seemed to be a reasonably good work up to travelling around Peru. The bus journey itself was barmy! This wasn’t the company’s fault – they were fine – but the bus seemed to be stopped every 10 minutes for some vehicle check or another. Sometimes all the passengers were herded out, told to get their luggage, then told to leave their luggage, and finally made to walk through a random customs-like building while the bus was driven all of 10 m along side, before being allowed to get back on. Most often we just sat in the bus as the driver talked to the various Police officials for 10 minutes or so. Once however we all had to surrender our passports to a Policeman who came on board. Disconcertingly he vanished off the bus with them, but thankfully returned 10 minutes later and gave them all back. We haven’t a clue what these checks are meant to achieve – if they wish to monitor the movement of people here it’s pretty futile as most of the cars passed through these checkpoints completely unmonitored.
Anyway, we did finally reach Arequipa, and we were relieved to find it a very pleasant city. We are presently checked into a nice hotel on the beautiful Plaza de Armas – but I’ll talk about that in the ‘Arequipa’ post on the www.catch-up-with-the-sun-southamerica.blogspot.com page in a few days time!
1 comment:
gotta love those hats!
have another Cachaca.
dont come home!
it's snowing and london
has packed-up
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