Boondock Puffins

Our final day in Cusco started off slightly stressfully with most of our morning pre-flight spent in a cafe with very questionable wifi trying to book a winter parking spot for our car back in France. This sounds simple but it turns out another joy of living in a ski town is that underground parking for the winter season is a very competitive time.

Once parking had been sorted and we had enjoyed one final hot chocolate in our favourite cafe – Organika Bakery – we set off to the airport.

It turns out Cusco airport is tiny, with slightly chaotic systems for checking in (as we probably should have expected). Our flight to Arequipa was severely delayed and for a long time it did not show up on any boards. If you are travelling in Peru, it’s worth noting that these more minor airports do not give announcements for boarding – once you’ve been told your gate number at check-in, the rest is up to you to figure out. As a result of the long delay, the airport needed our waiting section so we were herded out into the walkway as if we were about to get on the plane… long before the plane was ready. This would have been miserable but we thankfully got to stand right by a window and watch out bags get loaded onto the plane itself – something that sounds boring but was somehow oddly fascinating!

Eventually we found ourselves on the plane and in the air on the way to Arequipa. This is a city that appears out of nowhere. One minute you are seeing mountains that look like sand ripples in the wind but on a gigantic scale, volcanoes gently smoking away beneath, the next Arequipa appears beneath you, a mess of streets and buildings, plopped down in the middle of seeming desert.

As we were here for our friend’s wedding, we had been told that there would be a taxi to meet us at the airport. However, as we had been delayed so badly, we arrived to a warm greeting of no official taxi. This meant we had to wade through the barrage of airport taxi drivers who will say anything to try to get your custom. Following advice of our local friends, we went past this hoard and to the drop off point where taxis were offloading people into the airport. We had finally haggled with a driver and committed by putting our bags in the boot when another man ran up to ask if we were Tom and Eliza and announced that he was in fact our taxi driver. Cue the unloading and reloading of our bags and off to our hotel.

The Viza hotel in Arequipa is a little outside the centre, in an odd shopping district. Odd, because in Arequipa, it seems that shops are grouped together based on what they sell. As a result, you end up with 50 sunglasses shops along one street, then you get to the pots and pans street, then the shoe shops street and so on and so forth. This seems like a rather flawed business plan but it at least makes it easy to find what you’re looking for so long as you can locate the right area!

Having dropped off our bags, we went for a wander round, a quick shower and change in our luxuriously huge hotel room, and then headed out to supper at ZigZag. If you were to eat in only one place in Arequipa, this should make your (then short) list. We began with some free dough balls, champagne and fizzy water. Starters

Starters: trout fingers battered in sesame seeds; beef carpaccio.

Mains: trio of meats, ratatouille and some form of potato and 4 lots of sauces. To put this into perspective, we were given bibs to accompany this main course thanks to its amount ans messiness!

Puddings: hot chocolate; chocolate mousse with 3 sorts of Peruvian cacao.

Happy and with very full tummies, we wandered the 15 or so minutes back to our hotel. For once, Tom was not even tempted by the wafts of varying quality smells from the kebab shops along the street on our way back. Making it to the hotel, we set our alarms for early next morning and got in a good night’s sleep before going to the wedding of one of our best friends.

It turns out that an English/Peruvian wedding is quite an event, with a huge capacity for a mix of customs and traditions, and it is something for which we could not have prepared. Something about weddings in different languages is already quite fascinating and unexpectedly romantic as you focus more on the expressions of the bride and groom than on their words. We can also confirm that Peruvians really can dance incredibly well, and also have an amazing love of multiple sorts of potatoes! We don’t want to report much more than that about this private event, but suffice it to say, it was an epic day.