Pos: here
Loc: Playa Catarindo just behind Mollendo
Acc: Hotel in Arequipa
Dist: 0 km

Tomorrow:
No paddling tomorrow!

We had agreed with the THULE dealer in Arequipa to pick us up in Mollendo once we arrived. But as we didn’t have a perfect email and phone connection,
they had a bit of trouble to find us and to know when we really will be landing where!

But when I eventually updated my website yesterday night, Carlos found us camped in the backyard of Charlie’s beach restaurant – and
surely already nicely asleep at 9.15 pm!

Though we were happy about our “date” eventually working out despite the communication problems, we were definitively not happy to break down camp
and to move *this night* out of our well deserved sleep into Carlos car, driving 2 hrs through curvy mountain roads up to 3300 m to Arequipa…please pick us up tomorrow morning! Thanks! I was assuming Carlos will spend the night somewhere in Mollendo, but he and his friend were driving back this night, arriving at 2 am, and he drove back this morning again and picked us up at 7 am…sorry!..

For us gringos, the drive up the mountains was quite an experience, and we could feel the thin air very soon with a bit of a head ache due to the lack of oxygen.

We were surprised to see so many green fields everywhere, but only in between quite sandy desert areas! They are lucky to have ground water natural well for watering the area – or not. So it carried on being a patchy green and brown areas, with still the desert feel.

Arequipa is Peru’s second largest city. For our European eyes it had actually many international brands represented, but it was still what I’d call very Peruvian! And very different to the other two countries I had visited so far. It will be a nice new country to experience! Still we are there to mainly experience the water and the coastal areas, not that much of the cities and people…so this change with the drive to Arequipa is a nice change!

Thanks a lot to Carlos picking us up, and to his parents, owners of the car tuning shop who represent the THULE brand here in Arequipa, to host us in a nice hotel!

Still we had to do the usual online chores, got our new Peruvian sim cards for the cellphones, some Peruvian cash, and we will do our food shopping tomorrow. I’m hoping to find some new food stuffs for our daily meals!

Saturday I’ll do some press and promotion work in a mall where they have a THULE outlet, and probably Sunday we’ll start paddling again!