Along the Coast from Arequipa

Oops... I'm getting a little behind with my blog entries. This one has been sitting, started, waiting to be finished for a fair while now. Better buckle down and finish it :)

Sitting in the bus leaving Arequipa I was thinking that the landscape was positively desolate, when I realised that the moon landscape had changed to sand. Sand dunes. Duh! All this time I'd heard about the sandboarding that the tourist do around here. Where there is sandboarding there must be sand. And dunes.

Someone had told me that the trip from Arequipa to Lima was boring because there was nothing to see. I don't know. I was pretty happy in my comfortable and roomy front row bus seat, way up high. Yeah, there wasn't much to see in the way of plant life. Almost non-existant really. However, it was pretty impressive to see that the road looked like it was cut directly into really really big dune with a small concrete wall holding back all the sand from spilling across the highway. Sand dunes change to big rocky cliffs and back again. When we first got to the coast I saw all these houses that looked like they were half constructed. Brick walls with no roofs. Then I read in the Lonely Planet that most of the houses here got destroyed from the tidal wave caused by an earthquake in 2001.

I'm not sure that my stop in Chala was really worth it, but hey, I've seen it now. When I arrived it was dark and I couldn't see much, however, it was windy. Windy and cold. When I woke up and headed out to the street the first thing that greeted me was 4 drunk men shouting stuff (compliments or insults... not sure how to take them) and calling me gringita. There was a beach that looked clean enough but the first thing every man said to me was 'are you alone' and I wasn't sure whether this was just a conversation starter, a surprised 'how can a girl possibly be travelling alone' exclamation, or sussing out my vunerability to being mugged. So I didn't go swimming and my walk along the beach consisted mostly of walking to avoid having to talk to men.

(I have been in the jungle/tropics now for a couple of weeks and although here the men also still make hissing sounds, whistle, or shout 'hola' whenever I walk past, maybe even more than on the cost, it's a completely different feel. I think the people of la selva are much more relaxed and not aggressive. The funniest thing is how much the men change from whistling and being cocky to suddenly being shy and quiet if you turn back around and talk to them).

In Chala I visited some Inka ruins but they were mostly just ransacked tombs filled with bones and badly maintained. The last thing I did was buy a biscuit for the bus ride. It came with a free fly.