Mucho Calor

After checking out of our hotel, Jack's was our first stop on Sunday morning for a good old English breakfast.

Don't judge us. I know we're in South America and to be fair to us, we do always try the local food, but occasionally we just need a little taste of home! We've now been ten weeks without a cup of tea. That's very high on our bucket list when we get back!

After Jack's we watched the Man Utd game, bumped into Matt again (who'd been up all night drinking so was a little worse for wear) and then went back to our hotel to chill in the common areas and use the internet to catch up with friends and family.

Late afternoon we grabbed a snack and then got a taxi to the Cruz Del Sur bus terminal where we boarded our bus to Arequipa and said goodbye to Cusco.

Their professionalism was first class. They gave us receipts for our checked luggage, security checked everyone before getting on board and even took video footage of everyone in their seats once on board. The seats were really comfy and each seat had its own TV and the bus also boasted Wi-Fi on board.

However, as the bus pulled off, that's where the good stuff ended....

The Wi-Fi didn't work, neither did the TV. No problem though as we were planning to sleep the majority of the ten hour journey.

Most long haul buses in South America have a host on board who checks you're ok, brings you drinks/food and makes announcements upon departure and arrival. Normally they're bilingual but this one wasn't. No big deal though, we're in their country so we don't expect everyone to speak English for us.

As the lights went out an hour into the journey, the heating came on, full blast in our area on the bus (a small section of about ten seats on the ground floor of the double decker).

The heating didn't stop and after about 30 minutes, we all started sweating, huffing and puffing.

An American couple were first to break. They ran for our door and burst it open as if they'd been holding their breath the whole 30 minutes. They disappeared upstairs where temperatures were below 40 degrees and stayed there.

I stuck with it until about 1am when I decided I'd go on the lookout for our 'host' upstairs. However, it was dark, everyone was asleep up there and I had no idea where she was sitting/sleeping so I returned downstairs and stood outside of our door at the bottom of the stairs for an hour to cool down. 

When I went back in, it was hotter than ever.  

After our previous, Arctic experience on our bus to Chile, we always pack thermals in our hand luggage for bus rides but we needed swimming gear and sun tan lotion for this one.

At 3am and after 4 unsuccessful attempts to find the host to get her to turn the heating off, I took the decision on behalf of ten incredibly uncomfortable, angry and wide awake travellers and went and banged as loud as I could on the driver's blacked out window in the corridor. I banged and banged until he hit an emergency button (probably thinking he was being hijacked!) which alerted the host who came running down to see what was going on.

I explained (in Spanish I hasten to add) what the issue was, opened the door into our section and invited her in to see for herself. 

As soon as I opened the door she took a step backwards as the heat hit her just like when you open the door to a sauna. I wish I was exaggerating but honestly, I'm not at all.

She ran upstairs and immediately the heat stopped and aircon came on.

We all settled back in to our seats and hoped that we'd get at least 3 hour's sleep before we arrived around 6am. However.....the driver was in a hurry and in South America they have a law that when a bus driver exceeds the speed limit, it triggers a loud alarm to all the passengers, not the driver, just the passengers!!

This alarm went off approximately every 10 minutes for the remaining 3 hours.

We arrived in Arequipa exhausted after getting about 2 hour's sleep in total.

I'm pretty sure bus rides are supposed to be enjoyable or at least a practical way of getting from A to B. However, this was more like an endurance test.

We were collected and taken to the travel agent's office where we were collected again by our tour guide who was to be looking after us for the next 2 days.