Crossing the Border
Trip Start
Sep 06, 2007
1
10
12
Trip End
Ongoing
Tacna, Peru
Monday, December 3, 2007
My flight to Tacna was scheduled for 9:30am on December 3 and I was scheduled to return in the evening of December 8. I got an email a few days before I left saying that my return flight had been moved to noon. I arrived at the airport to leave Arequipa only to find that my departure flight had also been changed (gotta love AeroCondor!) to 4:30pm, though I hadn't been notified. It just didn't seem worth it to take my luggage and go back to the room I was renting for a few hours and then take another taxi back to the airport. Once I discovered that there is no internet access in the Arequipa airport (it's only the second largest city in Peru!), I thought that maybe it would make sense to go back, but by that time there wasn't a single taxi at the airport since there wasn't a flight scheduled until mid-afternoon. Luckily I had a book.
I did meet man, who was really hot and I thought, "finally!" We talked for a while, he was from Nigeria but lives in Philadelphia and was traveling around South America. I don't have a cell phone in Peru and he doesn't like email, so he gave me his number and told me he'd be back in Arequipa in a few weeks and to call him. As he was tearing a page out of his daytimer to write his number on, I noticed he had Bible verses written on another page. Major turn-off for me. I kept his phone number throughout the trip, but ended up tossing it when I got back.
Except for the long wait for my flight to leave, the rest of the trip was smooth. I arrived in Tacna and found a taxi at the airport to take me over the border. It was $40 as opposed to under $10 for the bus, but at the border I only had to wait for my bags to be checked, not a busload of people. Since I'd already lost the day because of my flight change, I decided it was worth it to get to Arica faster.
