Recovering from the trek

We spent one more day in Arequipa before moving on, but I think we needed it! I didn't sleep very well in the hostel- no one really did in our room, as we'd had such a weird sleeping pattern over the past couple of nights, plus we had been woken up by these fireworks going off at 5am. Two girls and a guy got up too to go to the airport (they'd had a nightmare: the boy had had his bag lost in all sorts of airports and the girl had had everything stolen apart from her passport, so it wasn't the best start to their trip!). Over breakfast we talked to an English couple our age who were travelling for five months. They recommended loads of things for us to do in Bolivia. We spent the day wandering around the town, our muscles killing, so we managed to squeeze an ice cream into our day! We sat in the main square for half an hour, minding our own business and watching the kids play with pigeons etc, but we were approached three times by people to have photos taken with us on the bench. It got pretty frustrating in the end, so just had to leave before we were pestered anymore.

We had initially been looking forward to buying some alpaca in Arequipa as a few people from the hostel had bought some really nice jumpers, but Sunday is their day off and the only shops that were open were food places. There also weren't any decent markets selling clothes that we'd seen either. It was lucky though because we got chatting to the English couple from breakfast outside that afternoon and they told us to save oursves for the markets in La Paz as the variety is great and it's so cheap to buy alpaca clothing so we plan to do some shopping on our way home. (Family, put your requests in soon!)

We got organised before heading out to dinner. First of all, we walked to the office were we did our canyon tour from, as we were picking up Laura's glasses as she left them at the oasis and was already in Cusco, so we were going to give them back to her when we next saw her. We went to the place we'd eaten lunch on the first day. Jen ordered spaghetti which came quickly enough. They ended up forgetting about my salad and it came 15 mins after Jen finished her food. We haven't had much luck with food before catching buses, so we raced back to the hostel. The couple we we going to share a taxi with to the bus station had already left and we caught one twenty minutes later. Anyway, we got there and it was fine! Our bus journey was okay and I slept for about five hours, before arriving early morning in Cusco, for our next adventure! Machu Picchu! Excited!