Been there done that.

Feb14-15 Camana to Moquegua

Being Friday night at the beach it was time for the kids to party, thus our sleep was less than perfect as the loud thumping music did not stop until 4am.  We start out together, sort of. Armando is ready to go at 7am, mainly because he slept well despite the noise and heads out on his own. We need a few extra minutes and then go for a watermelon breakfast. One more stop for fuel and we are off, this is when we see Armando across the street finishing his breakfast. Now we get to ride together part of the way as he is going into Arequipa and we are going to Moquegua for a couple of days. We have some chores to take care of and there is no sense in going into the big city when the small one will do just fine.

Two semi trucks rolled over, onions everywhere.

More awesome scenery.

Moquegua is bustling with activity as it is Saturday and that means market day. We are only here for two night so there is no need to buy a bunch of fruit, just some snacks for the hotel room as we finalize our route and update the blog. We also have to buy a stove for one of our rentals, the work never stops.

Feb 16 Moguequa to Arica

From our hotel window we could see a lookout point with a suspension bridge to a Cristo. We attempted to find it but were unsuccessful as we could not locate the access road, this would have provided a great overview of the Moquegua valley with the lush green farmland in the bottom of the otherwise barren landscape. We are content to just circle around the town in the attempt and ultimately get back onto the highway as we have some miles to make today which includes a stop in Tacna and a border crossing.

As things go, just outside of town we see a fellow travel bike and the enthusiastic wave gives us cause to pull over and see if they need help or are just being friendly. The couple is from Colombia and they were just being friendly, this turned into a bit of a visit on the roadside and once they were finished their tea we headed off in separate directions. 

The route once again looks different in the opposite direction and as we approach Tacna we realize that we are on the hill that we could see from our hotel during our first visit to town. It was nice to get our bearings so quickly and soon enough we found the Scotiabank which was the only reason for coming into town. In Tacna we can withdrawl US dollars that will be needed in Argentina later on. The only problem is that we could only withdrawl $100 at a time so it became apparent that this would not work for us. The service charges would eat up any saving on the exchange rate.

No harm no foul, we made our way out of town and figured that we could stop at one of the little bike shops along the highway for a can of chain lube. Brenda’s little wipeout punctured the can we had. Memory being what it is, there are no bike shops along the highway out of town, instead we opt for a quick lunch at a little local joint that we find by accident. For $5soles we get a huge bowl of chicken noodle soup, rice with a piece chicken, drinks, and a bowl of orange jello for desert. Great value and tasty too.

The only sign for the restaurant was the Menu sign attached to the power pole.

The border crossing is a bit worrisome as  we have all kinds of food that is not allowed across the border into Chile. We do not want to lose the olive, olive oil, honey, or apples we are packing so we do our best to hide what we can in our luggage and hope they do not search us. Well they did not search us but they did make us take all the luggage off the bikes and run it through the xray machine, I tried to talk them out of it as it is a bit of work to remove everything. They did not seem to care how long it took me to do this, they just wanted it put through the scanner. Crap, we thought we were going to get busted for sure this time. We put our luggage on the belt and waited for the officer to lose his mind, instead he just said Gracias and indicated that we could put the luggage back on. How is that possible, the last time they caught us with one little plum they lost their minds but this time nothing.

We try our luck at the same hotel in Arica but they are full. This leads to a couple of hours of driving around to eight different places before we finally find an acceptable room, most places were full as there was a festival in town. We also realized that we lost two hours due to a time zone change at the border which made for a short evening. 8pm turned into 10pm rather quickly, despite this we were still able to fall asleep by 10:30. Funny, we have been in Arica twice and have still not seen any of the town.

It appears that our hotel was designed by Burger Baron.