Bus Travel

You will all be happy to know we survived our 46hr bus rides, but not with out a few kinks! Day one.....We show up for the bus, packed and excited for our adventure but the bus doesn't show up. What?! The bus that we were supposed to take broke down some place in the never ending Chilean desert and never showed to the bus station. This was the most important leg of our trip from Santiago to Tacna Peru. Of course we weren't contacted about this until one hour prior to leaving, when we arrived (Man we love doing business down here!). We were directed to a different bus company that had an afternoon bus to a different city up north so we jumped on that bus and headed to Arica (the Chilean border city). From there, we feared crossing the Peruvian border at 11pm but you gotta do what you gotta do. It wasn't too shabby. We hopped in a 1968 caddy and sped across the border, after picking up 2 Peruvian policemen. We spent one night in the border town in Tacna, Peru which we painted to be a dangerous craphole, but surprisingly it was pretty nice. We stayed in a quaint hotel for $25 and enjoyed a delicious Italian food dinner for $11. It was smooth sailing from there. We took 2 more buses and woke up Friday morning in Cusco at 6:30am. We believe that we may have come close to dying several times on our last bus trip from Arequipa to Cusco because we came to screeching halts and herd things hitting the bus. We climbed up to some 11,500 ft, perhaps through a dense jungle. I swear half was on dirt roads.

Jess enjoying a Nesquik chocloate pop in the Tacna Bus depot.