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We basically went from Puno to Chile with a night stopover in Arequipa and crossing the border from Tacna. The change was immediate and noticeable. People still speak Spanish, but the roads are in good shape, buildings don’t look run down, cars don’t constantly honk, traffic is orderly the money is in huge denominations and it’s a lot more expensive. We actually spent $20 on a meal the other night. Ouch. The modernity is nice though. I missed it.

The money is about $1 = 500 pesos. Our room is about 7,000 pesos per night. After trying to divide by 500 for a while Kim realized you can just doube the number and remove three zeros and it’s in dollars. So 7,000 = $14. It still give me sticker shock sometime seeing all those zeros.

Crossing the border was fairly easy. We took a bus from Tacna. The only part we didn’t like at all is that the driver takes everyone’s IDs, our passports too, and runs them quickly through the Peruvian exit station. We weren’t too comfortable with this and kept a close eye on the guy with our passports, but everything turned out fine. Entering into Chile all we had to do was through away a few fruits and our coca leaves, and get a stamp. We would have liked to take the train across, but it only leaves twice a day and we weren’t sure exactly when. Mabye on the way back we’ll take it if we continue our avoidance of that $100 Bolivian border crossing fee.

Chile continues the barren, desert landscape of coastal Peru. Arica is sunny and warm and has some nice beaches that we won’t be going to. We’re bothsuper sun sensitive from taking our antimalaria medication, doxycycline, which we are supposed to take 4 weeks after the malaria exposure area, plus the sun here is super strong anyway. There’s not much of tourist import in Arica, but from here we’re heading to Lauca National Park on the Bolivian border.