"You want to take a holiday in Arequipa?" our friends in Lima said, sounding slightly bemused. "You want to be careful if you go there – they say that that’s the City of Thieves."
This didn’t put me and my family off. During the late 1980s when my father was a missionary working in Peru, the Sendero Luminoso terrorist group had an iron grip on a large chunk of the mountain country and it wasn't safe for gringos (white people) to visit anywhere in the Andes apart from Cuzco and Macchu Picchu. The other alternatives for our annual holiday were Iquitos in the Amazon jungle, and Arequipa. My mother can't stand humidity, so Arequipa it was.
We decided to take the bus rather than flying, as this would allow us to spend a day or so in Nazca, seeing those famous mystery lines in the desert. And the visit to Nazca was well worth the endless travel along the Pan-American Highway through the Atacama Desert with comfort stops only occurring every three hours.
The bus from Nazca to Arequipa was supposed to roll through late in the evening, so we only checked into the hotel for one night. ... read more >>