Arequipa

Yesterday in Hucachina, Dylan´s stomach was no better and I had to head out to the sand dunes by myself (well, with the rest of the group).
It was awful, the single most horrfying thing I have spent money on in a long time. Not the sandboarding itself, that was actually kind of lame since we had super crappy boards with broken straps for bindings, so we just had to go down laying on our stomachs, head first. No, but the dune buggies.... I thought they were for transportation only, but appearantly riding in those monsters on wheel were part of the adventure and our driver was insane. He drove like he wanted us all dead. When we stopped at the first hill, one girl was crying (not me but only because I was in too much of a shock) the guy next to me stole my seat because it was "too scary to sit on the end" and the rest of us were just shaking, wiping the snot, sand and eye ball juice of our faces. The crying girl asked the driver to please go slower, which just made him laugh and blast away even faster to the next hill. It was not fun. Scarier than any roller coaster I have ever been on. And I don´t even like roller coasters. It was probably a really good thing Dylan didn´t go cause it would have made him shit his pants for sure.

But while I was paying money to be scared to death, Dylan headed out for new diarrhea pills and found some that were so effective ("I´m backed up like concrete...") he decided it would be safe to ride the nightbus to Arequipa. So we did. But since we decided to go so late, we could only find tickets to the crappiest bus. They were cheap though, and much to our surprise we actually made it here on time. So now we´re trying to set up a trip out to the Colca Canyon tomorrow and hopefully spot some condors on the way. We´re also debating whether to buss it the whole way to Santiago or get a domestic flight in Chile since they´re pretty cheap.
We´ll see, if we do decide to fly, we´ll probably stay here a little longer and maybe try to take a Spanish class or two. A lot of places offer them, but we haven´t stayed anywhere long enough to sign up yet.... and we´re doing ok with sign language, our limited Spanish and most local´s limited English, but it would be nice to get more of a vocabulary.