Looking back I can't really explain why I
stayed in Arequipa for so long. It was probably a combination of
travel fatigue and freaking out about the fast approaching end of my
trip (and associated return to “real life”) which prompted me to
start thinking about the future and looking for jobs back in the UK.
I moved out of the relatively expensive Irish party hostel I'd been
staying at into a more chilled out local run place. My recollection
of the 2 weeks is a little hazy but involved a lot of time in the
local library job hunting on the internet, cheap Chinese-Peruvian
food (called Chifa) and a bit of sightseeing around Arequipa.
Although in some ways reminiscent of a European
city (attractive colonial-era architecture was ever-present, as were
the McDonald's and Starbucks jostling for space with the local
restaurants), Arequipa still held a lot of Peruvian quirks. One of
the most striking was the clustering of shops which sold exactly the
same thing and resulted in particular streets around the city being
lined exclusively with, for example, opticians or suit makers etc.
Apparently this is useful for shopping around and haggling the pants
off competing shopkeepers. Makes sense I guess. Probably makes price fixing easier too.
 |
| Typical plate of tasty chifa |
I frequented the library in Arequipa so often
that I became friendly with the receptionists to the point where one
of them even invited me to her friend's wedding which I sadly
couldn't attend since I'd forgotten to bring my suit to South
America. The library also contained some private study rooms for
which I was competing with a bunch of, believe it or not, physicists.
I'd walk into the rooms in the morning to find
a garbled mess of maths and graphs which my brain assured me I'd
known the meaning of once upon a time but which now looked like utter
gibberish. Seeing the physicists sweating away at horrible looking
equations late into the night really took me back to last year. Did I
detect a faint urge within myself to go back to it all...?
At some point, the fear of not having a job
when I got home was overpowered by the fear that I wouldn't actually
make it to Buenos Aires in time for my flight home if I didn't start
travelling again. And so on Friday the 9th of March I
finally packed my bags, waved goodbye to the hostel owners with whom
I'd shared a frequent rum and jumped in a cab headed to the bus
terminal.
The chatty cab driver further put me in a
travelling mood and, as we saw a wild eyed man in a torn shirt
running away from a woman who looked like she was in the process of
beating the crap out of him, I decided this was the right time to
leave.
A relatively short bus journey saw me travel
east and end up at Puno, a town near the Bolivian border, where I was
rewarded with a glimpse of Lake Titikaka. Puno was a little touristy
but it was nice to be exploring new places again. For dinner I found
a cheap little place, asked for a typical dish and received fried
sausage with spaghetti and chips. This was not my first, and
certainly wouldn't be my last, encounter with “double-carbohydrates”
which is omnipresent in Peru and goes some way to explaining people's
podginess. Although I would be crossing into Bolivia tomorrow I'd
been told the food there was more of the same. Bring it on.
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