Wrapping up Peru

The day we climbed down from Machu Picchu, we headed out to make our way back to Cusco one last time. It was another round of harrowing vans and buses, and the way back was way worse for some reason. We made it back to Cusco, and stayed for a day before heading to Arequipa.

Arequipa is known as the white city because its buildings are made from white volcanic stone. We decided to do a two day hike of Colca Canyon which was a couple of hours away from Arequipa. We took at 3 am bus from Arequipa to the Canyon, and started out hike.

“Slicing through the High Andes like a giant fissure for more than 100km, Colca is the world's second deepest canyon, approximately 3,400m at its deepest point -- a shade shallower that the nearby Cotahuasi Canyon and nearly twice as deep as the US' Grand Canyon”

-taken from internet.

The first day of the hike consisted of going down one side of the canyon all the way the floor to where there was an oasis that most people stayed at over night. We wanted to do out trip in less days, so after getting more water at the oasis, we hiked all the way back up the other side, missed the turn-off to the trail we were supposed to take, and ended up hitching a ride back down part of the mountain in a truck. It turned out the trail had been taken out by a landslide.

We finally made it back down the canyon to a small hostel where we stayed in a room for 3 dollars, and then started back up the other side of the canyon the next morning. Three hours later we made it back into town where we took a bus back to Arequipa.

For the rest of our time in Arequipa we toured a monastery, ate traditional food (Christina ate alpaca steak), and wandered the city. We took another night bus back to Lima, where we would have three days before heading back to Costa Rica. We spent our time in Lima with friends that we had met around Peru, and it was a really wonderful time…the calm before the storm.

We got to the airport in Lima three hours early, only to find out that they were not going to let us onto the plane to go to Panama because we didn’t have bus tickets to leave Panama. The reason we didn’t have tickets was because the bus company told us we couldn’t buy tickets a month and half in advance and that we could just buy them when we got back to Panama. Lies.

They didn’t have a phone number, we couldn’t buy them online, and the other bus company’s website wasn’t working. We could be more tickets from the airline and the cancel them, but that was going to include $100 of fees, and we would have had to wander downtown Panama City at night looking for their “cancelation office” which wasn’t in the airport.

Instead, I found Christina working furiously on her phone, and I found out that she was making fake bus confirmation tickets that said we were leaving Panama for Costa Rica. By that time, our plane was almost leaving, so we sprinted to check-in, out fake tickets passed inspection, and then we sprinted from one end of the airport all the way to the other to find out gate.

No one else even looked at our tickets, and we made it out of the Panama Airport, and back to the bus station to buy our tickets to get back into Costa Rica. Naturally, there were no tickets back to Costa Rica until the next week. Same with the other company, but before we had a heart attack, we found a bus that would drop us off at the border, and then we would have to find another bus to San Jose.

Bus to Panama/Costa Rica Border (7 hours)> wait at border (7 hours)>bus back to San Jose, Costa Rica (8 hours)> Bus to San Ramon (1.5 hours)> HOME!!!

We made it, and then the next day had three hour advanced Spanish class.

There is the conclusion of our Peru trip.