This one takes the cake for weirdest Thanksgiving ever. Obviously, it doesn’t even feel like it, as we’re in a country that doesn’t even celebrate. 

Anyway. I slept til almost 5:00 am today. It gets light here super early. 

We killed time until just before 7:00 and went down to breakfast. That was pretty good – eggs, bread, jam, yogurt, fresh fruit, good coffee…  

We went back upstairs and chilled out for a bit, then FaceTimed our parents – it’s a holiday after all. 

We had to check out by 10:00, so we went down a few minutes before that and checked our bags with the hotel. We wandered around town for a bit, and stopped at a coffee shop for coffee and some food – the cheese omelette and my latte were pretty good. 

We came back to the hotel for a few, and our tour picked us up a little early. We got a taxi to the dock and joined a tour on a boat. 

The boat took us to the “floating island” of Uros, where we learned that the islands are made of chunks of reed (actually, papyrus) roots that are cut into cubes that are staked together with bamboo. They are then covered with reeds every 15 days and left to meld together for a few months. Eventually, reed huts are built on top of them, where people live. Each community has a president, which they made a point of saying is always a woman. We got to see inside one of their huts, then we had the pleasure of negotiating to buy a few things from them – a cool piece of woven wall art for us and pillow covers for our mothers. 

Along the way, they explained to us the meaning of the word “Titicaca.” Titi is puma in Incan, and caca is stone. On a map, the lake has the rough shape of a puma eating a rabbit. Pretty cool. 

Then they took us on a “gondola” ride to another island – devil cat catamarans are kinda what tbose boats reminded me of.  It was fun, anyway. We hung at the second island for a bit – a few people got food – and then came back to Puno. 

We went to a bar, whose name we forgot to write down, and had a beer. It was cool – it reminded me of a bad club in college – but the beer was cheap and the atmosphere was good. 

Then we went to dinner at a cafe, which was alright, but we had to wait forever for our food… Which was just alright. Not as amazing as I would’ve wanted for as long as we waited, but still pretty good. 

We stumbled our way back to the main square, decided we were freezing, and went back to the hotel to sit for hours before it was time to head to the bus station for our (ugh!) overnight bus to Arequipa. 

That bus station was WILD. It took us a while to figure out where we were supposed to be and then that we had to pay some booking fee. And everywhere people were just screaming, “Arequipa, Arequipa, AreQUIpa!’ I think they were trying to sell bus tickets or something. 

Eventually, we figured out what to do and where to go, and we dropped our bags under the bus and got on board. 

Sometime in the middle of the bus ride, Thursday became Friday…  

I didn’t sleep much on the ride. Matt was snoring beside me most of the ride, but I just couldn’t. We kept slowing down and stopping – one time I looked out the window and there was a bus stopped next to ours, and it looked like cops with flashlights were digging into all the open cargo doors looking for god knows what. We slowed down right then, and I held my breath until we started up again. 

So it went all night long…  Another time we just randomly stopped and the driver got out. Hopefully he just had to pee, but who knows. And yet another time, the driver pretty much didn’t slow down and blasted over a speed bump, and then a few minutes later pulled over. I feared we’d broken an axle or something. 

Luckily, we survived the night without falling off the side of a cliff or hitting another vehicle head on, and we arrived in Arequipa a few minutes before 5:00 in the morning. 

We grabbed a taxi and headed towards our hotel. On the way, it occurred to me that I hadn’t reached out to see about early check in, so we had no idea what was going to happen when we arrived. We also assumed, incorrectly, that there would be a proper lobby where we could talk to someone about our room. 

Our taxi dropped us off at the bottom of the hill and told us where our hotel was, so up we went. We found the place, and realized it was just a door with a doorbell that rang someone… We decided that was a terrible idea before 6:00 am, so we wandered a tiny bit further up the hill to the dead wnd and found a cute little plaza to sit for a few while we decided what to do. 

We looked online (thank GOD for a working eSIM card), and found out that not much opens by 6:00 in town, with the exception of a restaurant that served breakfast attached to another hotel in town. We decided to go there anyway, so off we went. 

Arequipa is BEAUTIFUL. We were in the historic district, and it’s lovely. All the buildings are white, made out of volcanic rock – I guess they call it the White City. 

We came upon the Plaza de Armas, the local main square in town, which is where the restaurant was we were looking for. We initially sat for a bit in the plaza debating, because we felt weird about going into a hotel that wasn’t ours with all our stuff on our backs.. Eventually hunger and desire for a cup of coffee won out and we went anyway. 

Breakfast was a buffet, and it was delicious. We sat and ate and drank coffee until we’d had our fill and walked back over to our hotel. By now, it was almost 8:00 and we didn’t feel so bad ringing the doorbell. 

The woman let us in, told us our room would be ready by about 12:30, and let us stow our crap behind the counter. We headed back out to the streets of Arequipa. 

We found more beautiful white buildings and more gorgeous streets. We wandered for quite a while, stopping out of sheer exhaustion every so often… We finally gave up and went back to the hotel, and thankfully our room was ready. We went in, threw our stuff down, and laid down for a while. 

Eventually, we got up and got our stuff together for (yet another) 2:00 something am wakeup. We found some dinner, a brewery (Nowhere) not too far away from the hotel. Then it was back to try to get some sleep before our (mostly) last early morning of the trip. 

Here’s the video: