It’s 5am, I’m in a dark street in Arequipa, with all my stuff, there’s no one on the street and I’m waiting for the bus. It was supposed to pick me up….. at 4….again…they must have forgotten?
Almost…at 5:30 ( in the email they had begged me to be on time by 4) a guy comes running in shouting my name and saying they were late…come on…I hadn’t noticed… 😀
I get on the bus and it’s already full, the only one who pretends to vacate the seat to let me sit is an Englishman… I’m too tired to converse (not that he seemed much inclined) but I can’t even sleep, it’s freezing cold!
The bus climbs lazily up an Andean pass, while I listen to my music (which will soon be called ‘tatita’).
The guide passes by the seats asking where she was supposed to drop us off, I who am not actually staying in the city of Puno (at least for the first 2 days) ask her to drop me off at the main stop… Crisis! She goes into complete panic…She can’t understand how I can do anything different from the others….
Eventually I decide to give her the name of a hotel in the city centre and she calms down…. ( the hotel where I was supposed to spend the last 2 days in the city).
After about 4 and a half hours of travelling I get dropped off in front of the hotel. I decide to go inside and ask at the reception desk the best way to reach the island of Amantanì, where I was to stay for the first 2 days. The last boat leaves at 2 p.m. It is 3 p.m.!
Panic, I realise that it would be impossible to reach the island on the same day, so with a lot of help and several calls we manage to shift the dates of the stays: the first and last days in Puno and the two central days on the island.
The evening passes quietly, between strolls in the city centre, shivers of cold (Puno is over 4000 metres above sea level) and a dinner that would make any Italian shiver….I can’t tell you, they would banish me from my country :DD