Peru by bus

A few hundred photos and an equal amount of mosquito bites later it was time to get used to the city life again. We left Cusco on a night bus to Arequipa. We really wanted to get to beaches already, but Peru is so huge that you either sit on a bus for 50 hours nonstop or break it down and actually visit a few cities. Our first stop was Arequipa, about 9 hours from Cusco. Arequipa is a city with the population of almost 900,000, but the center had more like a small town feel. We stayed there for 3 days doing pretty much nothing. A bit of walking around, eating ice-cream, reading and time passed quite fast that way. Arequipa was a nice city but only a stopover and a resting place for us, so we visited one church and decided that that was enough sightseeing for this time.

From Arequipa we took a night bus again, this time to Nazca. Nazca is famous for its lines made by the Incas. They are different in shapes and sizes and nobody really knows what their purpose was. We thought that would be interesting to see, but having spent way too much money with the jungle tours and Machu Picchu, we decided not to do the popular plane ride over the lines. Instead it is possible to take the bus to a built viewpoint, from which it is possible to see two of the many lines. The mirador was about 20 minutes away by bus. It was awfully hot and you couldn't see the most impressive ones anyway, so we took the next bus back after spending there about half an hour. A bit disappointed by not doing the plane ride and not seeing the lines properly, but being happy because of the saved money, we went back to the hostel to sleep one more night before taking off again.

A well-slept night and a nice lunch later we got on the bus heading to the capital, Lima. We had decided to stay in a safe but a bit posh area, Miraflores. 9 hours on the bus and 20 minutes in a taxi (mostly because the taxi driver had no clue where the right street was, but luckily my amazing Nokia has a navigator with maps of Peru) and we arrived at our hostel. For us Lima sounded like just another big city, nicely located on the coast though, so we only stayed for two nights. First day we spent recovering from the noisy bus ride and happy to have a hostel with good cooking facilities, we enjoyed making our own food and chilling in the backyard. Next day, still feeling lazy, we though we should at least visit the city center so we took a taxi and took a guided tour in the dusty, bone-filled catacombs in the cathedral of San Francisco. After walking around the city for a while, we took a taxi back to Miraflores, to see a park at the beach, Parque del Amor. A nice little park, but the windy and chilly weather made us start the walk through Miraflores towards the hostel pretty quicky. Around the Parque Kennedy there are many nice cafes and restaurants, so we stopped for a frozen mocha and a coffee with Baileys on the way.

Next day we were happy to hop on the bus again, knowing that after the 18 hours of bad movies and worse music we would be on the sunny beach of Máncora, northern Peru.