The thing about bus rides… Friday and Saturday 2/17-2/18/12

I turns out that when you take a bus, the estimated duration of your trip is just that. An estimation.

For me, that meant that my twenty-one hour bus ride quickly (or slowly…) became a twenty-six and a half hour one because of rockslides that blocked the road. It’s a good thing the bus was as interesting as it was.

As whole it was a pretty surreal experience.

Laura and I boarded the bus at night to find neatly folded fleece blankets embroidered with the bus company’s logo, Cruz del Sur, and pillows in our front row reclining seats on the second story of the bus. Once the bus started moving, we were served hot tea and played a bus wide game of bingo (Still a little unclear on the rules… but we might have almost won?). We went to sleep in the cold rainy Andes, woke up on roads sandwiched between vertical slopes and GIANT rivers and again in snowy fields. Then we drove through vineyards, the Nazca lines, and ended up in a desert by the ocean to arrive in Lima. A simultaneously nausea and awe inducing experience.
Also during the bus ride: talked to a cool Argentinian couple sitting close by, almost got left at a bathroom in Ica (little city on the way), made a surprise stop at this confusing restaurant because we were so late (also in Ica), and watched tons of movies. Why a bus company would ever choose to play “The Lovely Bones” right before the bus’s arrival in a giant city is beyond me.

After arriving and navigating the bus station with our unwieldy luggage, we hailed a taxi and headed to our hotel in the beautiful Miraflores district.

There we were reunited with another friend, Ivana, who arrived in Peru early to visit old family friends. Over lemonade, valentine chocolate, and lúcuma (a weirdly enticing sweet potato like fruit that is super typical of Peru), we played round after round of cards and rehashed our weeks while waiting for the arrival of the rest of the Davidson group, until we gave up and collapsed into clean sheets and still beds before midnight.