Bus journey hell

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  Tacna to Cuzco, Peru
Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Over the past seven weeks or so we had got used to some quite long and not particularly nice journeys, but the journey to Cusco was the worst we have had by quite a margin.

We bought a ticket to Cusco and was told that we would leave at 7.30 and arrive at Cusco around 6.30 the next morning. We get there and were put in to an old cadillac driven by one of the guys from the coach company who took us over the border, the idea being we would then get on a Coach from Tacna in Peru to Cusco.  Unfortunately the company had not booked the coach for us and we find out when we get there that we will be going on the 7pm coach getting in to Cusco about three the next afternoon. So we had a full day in a town as interesting as Welwyn Garden City and after that a long long coach journey, we were not amused to say the least.
How we kept ourselves amused that day is a mystery. We started with breakfast, where the waiter tried to charge me 24 soles for our food instead of 11, when I  challenged him he went away and came back with a menu that he had just modified with a ballpoint pen, he expected us to accept this even though we could see numerous other  menus with the correct prices on!!! Unfortunately I didnīt know the phrase for f%ckinīthief so I had to tell him he was one in English as I got the rest of my money back of him,  unfortunately I donīt think he understood; this was not the ideal introduction to Peru.
We went to the museum, this was one room about Peruvian independence that had last had a visitor a week ago, once we had done that in detail for the three minutes it took we then had no idea what to do for the following ten hours!!
We survived by playing numerous games of boggle (which Lal thrashed me at), spending an eternity on the Internet desperately looking for something of interest to pass the time and having some beers..
So, then we get on the coach. I only had a t-shirt, fleece and shorts on as every coach had been heated (but now we were in Peru). This coach was a mobile ice station zebra, it was clearly cold outside but they appeared to be trying to refrigerate the coach aswell so that when we got in to Cusco and they opened the doors I would be frozen solid like someone out of the film Good Fellas. We ended up grabbing the backseat and trying to share body heat to survive like at a bloody base camp, I have rarely been as cold! The coach was absolutely filthy, this would not bother me much normally but when you are frozen solid, absolutely knackered and miserable you want to be able to go to the toilet without the aroma making you want to vomit, nice!!!

The final touch was that I put our books that we were reading on the floor, some Peruvian then proceeded to pinch these two tatty English books, I had heard that there were a lot of tea leaves in Peru but to pinch books they canīt even read seems silly. All in all by the time we got in to Cusco at 3.30 the next day (33 hour journey) we were not big up on Peru. Things have changed since but it was certainly a memorable introduction to Peru...!!

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