Loving and Leaving Lima

 Waking up in Tacna, Amanda and I delved into research on the best way to get out of it. We spent the morning on the phone with Jetblue, OneTravel, and everyone else we'd made arrangements with for our returning flight that was initially scheduled for May. Trying to appeal to the compassionate side of customer service, we pleaded to get out of cancellation and change fees. With little avail we squeezed an unhealthy amount out of our budgets for new return flights. Pausing for another breakfast of eggs with a side of lighter fuel, we packed up and took off for the airport. The ride to the airport took us a bit 'out of town' which is when is became clear Tacna was where the movie Holes should have been set. To say there is nothing, doesn't even explain the terrain of this town. There are boxes made of brick with one top opening that could be a window. There were barely any people and I'm afraid I'll be offensive if I call them houses because I did not see one person around these buildings within miles.
      Back at the hotel, we had tried to book flights to Lima, but the website wasn't taking non-Peruvian credit cards, so we set out to the airport in hopes of just...well, making it. When we pulled up to the airport that has maybe a maximum of three outgoing flights a day, we were nothing short of an absolute shit show. Getting to the counter, I gave him a confirmation number and told him we hadn't paid yet. Our desired flight was taking off in forty five minutes. He told us he couldn't take cash for the tickets and that we had to pay for the tickets in town, but we could perhaps take the later flight out at 5pm. With this news Amanda flashed her pearly whites and I put it all out on the table that we needed to be on the immediate flight out. Oddly enough  for this scenario, the airport which had nearly nothing in it, had a bank, which we could go pay at. He had us wait there to check with his supervisor, Carmen, if we could pay with the bank. When we looked back over at the bank, the lights were off and the one woman who'd been sitting in there was gone. The guy who'd been helping us, ran out of the airport to go get her and bribe her back from her lunch break. We thanked her and then discovered she only took cash. We scrounged up our last dollars and soles, which we only had in anticipation of paying for a Chilean visa. She gave us a receipt and we went back to the first counter and gave it to Carmen in exchange for our tickets. She then took the tickets, put on an air traffic control vest and walked out. Confused Amanda and I sat down per their request and waited as another ten minutes shuffled by. Our plane was taking off in less than fifteen minutes and we were still sitting in the lobby without tickets. We questioned where in the world Carmen, newly named San Diego, had gone and went back to the counter, where another man printed our tickets then directed us to go and open our checked bags for security. Fearful our bags wouldn't make it onto the plane, we realized all the bags for the flight were still just sitting in a pile behind the counter. We went through security after the staff became informed we were still trying to get on the flight. We ran outside and broke out into a run as we saw they were about to wheel away the stairs to get onto the plane. Hysterically laughing while carrying all the things we couldn't fit into backpacks, we ran up the stairs and onto the plane where everyone stared at us like the idiots we were. We crashed into our seats trying to regain our breath. The plane was huge for a one hour flight and near us, in the very back, it was almost empty. An hour later we arrived in Lima with no plan other than to leave the next night.
      Last time we were in Lima we stayed near the airport because we had a 6AM flight. After the fact, everyone told us how lucky we were not to have been murdered for staying in that area. This time around we decided to stay in the nicer part of town, Miraflores. We did our best to find two things we desperately needed; wifi and icecream. We settled on gelato and a data plan and started researching decent hotels in the area. I told Amanda at this point we were no longer traveling. The trip had been unfortunately cut short, but I was going to take advantage of the situation. We were now on vacation and I wanted a pool. The difference between traveling and vacationing is about five stars. With some back up help from Amanda's boyfriend overseas, he booked a room for us at the hotel we were looking at through a terrible poor internet connection.
     We then left the airport in search for a taxi driver that wouldn't charge an obscene amount or kidnap us. Negotiating the price down, we got a guy to take us that didn't distinctly seem like a serial killer, though he was definitely confused when with forty pound backpacks we requested to be taken to a five star hotel. We told him about having just been in the earthquake region, trying to get into Chile and how we were leaving the next day and he offered to pick us up the following evening.
    When we arrived at the hotel, the receptionist tried to tell us she didn't have a reservation, but Amanda gave them her confirmation number and they showed us to a room, right next to their construction zone. Ageism people...it's real. We were the only people in the hotel that were under sixty. No, sixty for the white people, forty for the South Americans. A very pleasant ( and friendly) concierge named Steve showed us to our room, where we screamed and jumped on the bed like every kid that goes to a hotel in a Disney movie. The room was huge with a big bathroom and a kitchenette. And most importantly a rooftop pool.
   

            We showered and got ready for what we anticipated to be a big night on the town. After over feeding ourselves with delicious seafood, we downed a few Pisco Sours and decided we were too full to carry on anything else. Steve, however, had different plans for us when he called inviting us to a bar at ten pm. We kindly took his suggestion and then fell asleep.

       The next day we spent the morning at the pool. Cusco was a dangerous place to tan. You burnt in less than ten minutes and then it started raining. We laid out reading and journaling for a few hours and then got dressed for a delicious three course lunch the hotel was offering. We returned to our rooms, packed our bags, checked out and went shopping for the next few hours. We came back to the hotel for our bags and another Pisco Sour or too before heading off to the airport. Everything at the airport went smoothly and we ended up next to a very pleasant Peruvian Born firefighter from Georgia. For some reason the flight was nearly impossible to sleep on and we arrived in Fort Lauderdale, feeling groggy and disgusting. We both were flying to Georgia for our last leg of the trip home and honestly the whole thing seemed surreal. Particularly when we were scowled upon for searching for mimosas at 7:30 AM. When we landed Amanda only had a twenty minute connection so we said a very rushed goodbye and set off for our next gate, where we again departed for our so called homes.

        I've 'come home' a lot of times, with different emotions each time. I've felt ready, devastated, and excited, but this was the closest to nothing I've ever felt. It's obvious neither of us wanted to go home, but it didn't feel like this was a choice we were making. It felt like like the right thing to do on one hand, but on the other it just seemed like the course we were to follow, whether we liked it or not, it just seemed....written.

Shaken not Stirred

After Machu Picchu, our guests were on their way out. For the first time in a while, Amanda and I had the whole day to ourselves again. We went to an hour and a half of yoga classes probably every other day and continued to eat avocados as a staple of our diet. We each spent time with friends we'd met along the way and as we started packing to leave we talked about our feelings of leaving Cusco. Both overdue to leave Cusco, we discussed how the concept of a community is really important when developing an attachment to a place. Amanda had said in some ways she didn't feel the same sense of community necessary to want to stay. For me, I actually really felt a sense of community, as working in the cafe had introduced me to so many different people who became a part of my everyday life. At this point in our travels/lives we are both accustomed to leaving things behind. Although, I felt a strong sense of community there it wasn't something I had developed an attachment to. I liked most of the people I met and regularly interacted with in Cusco, but not enough to extend my stay. At that point it's not even about how much you like the individuals of the community, it's about whether it's conducive to your lifestyle and if its enabling or inhibiting you from becoming better.

Back to bus rides, we were planning on a ten hour trip to Arequipa, where we'd transfer to another five hour bus through the desert and then take a collectivo (a minivan) to cross the border. The bus we took to Arequipa was overnight and super comfortable. We would always take the VIP buses and the ones with full 180 or 160 degree recline for these kind of trips because it was worth the extra comfort. When we arrived in Arequipa, it was about 7am and our next bus wasn't leaving for another five hours. We walked across a very busy street, which was surprisingly bustling given the time. Trekking through the street with backpacks half our weight, the nagging voice that asks 'do you even like traveling?' came into my head.  I'd heard that taxi napping had become a huge problem in Arequipa so a big part of me wanted to just post up in the bus terminal for the next five hours. If you don't know what taxi napping is, it's basically you get in a cab that starts driving you out to god knows where, another guy gets in the taxi and they take all your belongings. Then one of the partners stays with you while another takes your card to an ATM and pulls out all your money. If you don't give them the correct PIN or have a lot of money in your account they have been known to distribute beatings, rapes, and cuts/slashes to faces. With this, I'm sure you can understand why I was content staying at the terminal. However, the women who'd given me all the information on the taxi nappings also gave me two legitimate taxi companies to call and recommended we go downtown while there. Amanda had no desire to stay at the terminal and convinced me, we should make the best of our time and go downtown. For reasons like this, I think we made such a good travelling pair. Sometimes I just need a kick in the pants ;) We drove into the downtown area, also called the Plaza de Armas and it was gorgeous. Shops and restaurants all around the plaza, beautiful flowers, and a large army of pigeons that scared the shit out of Amanda.

The weather was beautiful and we sat down for a delightful breakfast overlooking the square. The 'coffee' may or may not have been jet fuel, but everything else was good. We stayed until we had to move out of the sun and went down the the square to sit in the shade for a bit. After about a half hour we went in search of wifi and ended up at a hotel cafe, this time overlooking the square from the other side. We Facetimed our families and chatted about how smoothly the trip had gone so far. Little did we know. A few moments later as we started to pack up our things, we heard the sounds of drums beating in the distance. Across the plaza, a large group of people waving flags were coming down the street. Yet ANOTHER protest. We could only assume they were the miners that had been protesting and shutting down roads weeks before. Our same taxi driver came back to pick us up and was flagging us down from across the protests. We made our way to him and got back to the bus station in time to catch our second bus journey, this time to Tacna, a Southern Peruvian border town, with nothing but a bad reputation.

   An hour and a half into our drive and maybe forty five minutes into The Notebook in Spanish, we pulled over  in the middle of the desert surrounded by the Andes. One of the staff came into the lower deck we're sitting in and said that one of the four 'somethings' no functionado and it will be about an hour and a half wait. Amanda and I got comfortable and waited patiently for Ryan Gosling to come back on the screen and speak in a sexy Spanish accent. After about a half hour I stepped off the bus with  few other overheated people to look around the strange desert land we were residing in.

LEGIT Nothing Around for Miles...and Miles...and Miles

After roughly an hour and forty five minutes another bus came to pick us up and Ryan Gosling soon came back up on the screen. We'd been planning to arrive in Tacna around 5pm and immediately get in a collectivo to take us across the border, arriving at 7. We'd read a lot about borders being too dangerous to cross after dark and after another hour of driving we realized we were going to be well into night by the time we got to any borders. Amanda turned to me and asked if I thought it was safe to continue to try to cross the border that night or if we should try and stay in Tacna for the night. I told her I thought we should feel it out and see when we get there, but we hadn't heard of Tacna being particularly safe either and we had a hostel reservation in Arica. Since the passengers in front of us had been very kind, we asked them when we arrived in Tacna if they thought it was safe to cross. At this point everyone on the bus who heard us began trying to talk to us in rapid fire Spanish. What we found was that there had been a massive 8.2 earthquake very close to Arica, where we were trying to go. The roads were demolished and there was no way to get there. 

      In the meantime, most of the electricity in Tacna was out. One of the many people trying to help us told us of a safe hotel we could go to for only 35 soles. We went and were greeted by two women holding a candle outside. They led us to a clean room with two beds and a bathroom. We used our phones for light for about forty minutes before the electricity came back on. Soon after that came the aftershocks. They each got lighter as the night went on, but the first one was sturdy enough and it took me a minute before my body really registered the fact that the ground underneath me was moving.  Amanda being from Southern California was nowhere near as dumbfounded by this as I was.

Our View of Tacna....

...built for earthquakes, yeah?

      In the heat of this occurrence, Amanda and I started trying to map out what to do. The decision was made to get out of Tacna, pretty much as soon as we got into it. With the aftershocks, we knew we couldn't stay and that more earthquakes were expected in the same/similar areas. We couldn't get to Santiago through the roads, since they were destroyed and flying would involve going back up to Lima and paying nearly $900. We then considered going inland to Bolivia and maybe down to Argentina to get into Patagonia, but when it came down to it, the point of this trip was to do Peru and Chile. Changing it around meant entrance visas for both countries, which neared $150 each. After a very anxious night with minimal sleep, in the morning, we decided we were going home.