Trailing to Patagonia: Arequipa - Home Base for the Winter

We left Cusco for Arequipa, known as “La Ciudad Blanca,” or “the white city” of Peru.

We had intentions of finding jobs and waiting out the winter here. We had looked in both Lima and Cusco, but decided that Arequipa would be a better place to call home for two months or so. According to all the guidebooks, it was a beautiful city with warm sunny weather (DEFINITE PLUS), and also had several nearby attractions to visit. With some quick internet research, we found that it also had plenty of demand for English teachers and translators. So this was it…our “home base” for the winter.

Volcan Misti, from Puente Grau in Arequipa

We got settled, and got to work distributing our resumes to many different places in the city. On our third night there, around midnight, we were woken up by people pounding on the bed and yelling from outside the camper. We woke up with a start, thinking some young Arequipeño hooligans were messing with us… until we recognized the voices.

We opened up the door, and there they were…. LINDA AND CHIQUIS! We had travelled with them for a month through some of Colombia and Ecuador. We had grown quite close to them travelling for that month, and it sure was good to see them again!

When Linda and Dario decided to stay in Arequipa and look for jobs as well, we knew we were in for a good stay. We love these guys!

All four of us were hired almost immediately by an English school in Arequipa called “Brittany”. It was perfect for us because they offer classes on a month-by-month basis, so we could stay for as many months as we liked. We began practicing fake British accents and were ready to go.

Ricardo and I rented a small space next to a nearby restaurant to park Cubby and that’s where we called home for two months, working in Arequipa. Our days were spent giving classes, our nights looking for cheap fun to be had in the city. Besides Linda and Dario, we met lots of other great people in Arequipa. All in all, the two months just flew by, and before we even knew it we were done being working stiffs and back on the road again.

Looking back, we have so many good memories from Arequipa that it is impossible to list them all in one post. It was great to get to know a place for longer than our usual few days – it gives a very different perspective of what that place is like. There were things that we didn’t like – the traffic, the smog, people’s habit of running into you on the street and cutting in front of you in lines – and things that we did like – the pretty downtown, a view of the Misti volcano, the warm days. We had a whole lot of fun, thanks to friends we met in Arequipa, and made some spending money for the trip.

A couple of important things happened to us during our time in Arequipa worth mentioning specifically –

1) With Linda and Dario, we finally had the courage to start playing music in the streets. Ricardo played his bagpipes, Chiquis accompanied him on the drum, and Linda and I even learned some Scottish dances. And the people love it! We had lots of fun making music and earning money doing it – we should have been doing this for the whole trip! But we decided to continue playing for the duration of the trip, once in a while in cities that we visit, even with just the two of us, to help with the finances.

2) We have a new addition to the “Trailing to Patagonia” family – and here she is:

Introducing...Shorty!

Shorty is a dog that was living on the street near where we lived in Arequipa. She would be at the restaurant every day, begging for food. She managed to live off the scraps she got, but they were always chasing her away with a broom or throwing things at her … pobrecita. She looked pretty raggedy and had an eye infection in both eyes. Within a few days of us being there, taking care of her eyes, and feeding her, she was sleeping under the camper at night and greeting us in a whirlwind of dust and excitement every time we came home. After a few weeks, she was unarguably our dog. There’s no way we could leave her after that. We took her to a vet who gave her the necessary vaccines for travelling, and she was ready to go. It’s like she was born to travel with us – she sleeps in the car, happily follows us where ever we go, and guards the camper when we’re not there. She’s a sweetheart.

So that's the story of our time in Arequipa - a bit different from our normal posts, but so was this "stop" on our journey. Goodbye, Arequipa, it’s been a blast!

Arequipa Memories: