Arequipa

Our bus arrived in Arequipa at 6am so we arrived at the hostel hours before we could check in. We were however allowed to shower and have some breakfast so could freshen up which was good. As we had lots of time to kill we decided to join the 10am free walking tour.

The tour took us around the downtown area of Arequipa. The historic centre has wide streets and you can tell when you get into the downtown area as the streets are narrower. Our guide was absolutely crazy! He was also slightly obsessed with food and drinks that are an aphrodisiac and kept using me and Simon as an example! This probably was due to the fact that at one point in the tour he asked if anyone was travelling as couple or with someone they love. I put my hand up, Simon didn't - awkward!

At one point in the tour we got a great view of the 3 volcanoes (one of which is dormant) that sit alongside Arequipa.

We also went to the main market which was designed by Gustave Eiffel. It's no way near as impressive as the Eiffel Tower, in fact you'd be hard pushed to realise that he designed it without being told. He also designed the market we visited in Cusco. The market was your typical Peruvian market that we get our juices from usually. Our tour guide said that they sold live guinea pigs in there but we couldn't find them so we're not sure if he was joking. Good job too otherwise I may have ended up adopting them all!

Whilst in the market our mental guide told us a very long winded story about how you could buy babies in the market. He talked about it for so long that we almost started to believe him. To cut a long story short, Peruvians are usually very conservative when it comes to courting except for one day a year where everyone gets a bit crazy and their are lots of unplanned pregnancies. Because of this, back in the day, you could buy a baby at the market approximately 9 months after the evening of crazy shenanigans. Nowadays you can buy a baby in the market all year round in the form of a loaf of bread with a very creepy looking clay baby face on the top! There may be more to this story but it was so random we lost track.

We were also introduced to cheese ice cream. The name is very misleading as there isn't actually any cheese in it. It gets its name as Peruvians have a habit of naming things like they look. It looks like slabs of cheese so they called it cheese ice cream.

After the tour we headed back to the hostel to check in, stopping off for a cheeky Starbucks en route. After popping out for some lunch we headed back to the hostel to catch up on the blog, as some of our followers have informed us we have gotten a bit slack!

In the evening, we went out for dinner to a pizza restaurant to satisfy Simons pizza addiction. It was really great pizza! I had the quinoa pizza which had a quinoa base with cheese, cherry tomatoes, sprouts (not the Christmas kind) and pineapple. Simon went for the hangover pizza as it had a fried egg on the top! We washed these down with a delicious glass of red and a beer.Read more