May 13, 2026
Woke up this morning at 5am, which is a little baffling since technically I gained an hour when leaving Chile so yesterday was an extra long day.
But, made use of the time. Had two missions to accomplish.
1. Get a yellow fever vaccine. There’s two state run hospitals in Arequipa that give it out for free. One does Monday and Wednesday, the other Tuesday and Thursday. Both do them from 7am to 11am. Today they were being done at the General Hospital Honorio Delgado Espinoza. It’s a 35 minute walk from my hotel, and it’s not like I had a lot planned for my day, so I walked it.
The vaccine clinic is in an outbuilding, so I never went into the hospital proper. Was somewhat curious what it was like in there, as a person who works at a moderate sized regional hospital, but there was a line out the door and they were triaging people out front, so I figured it was probably best to ignore my curiosity.
Vaccine clinic was very much a no line walk in tho. Only a little girl getting childhood vaccines in front of me, and nobody behind me. The latter being important, because this was a very linguistically challenging quest. I started off okay. “Yo neccisito una vacuna para fiebre amarilla”. That was about the best I could do, and promptly had to switch to Google translate. And, Google Translate apparently does not do health care scenarios well. All kinds of weird translation fails happened. My favorite was “you want the yellow beast?” But, we got through it.
Mission accomplished! Now I can enter Bolivia and Ecuador. Total cost: $0
2. The next quest was send my friend his honey back in the US. My plan was to hide it in something else and send that something else back to the states. So I bought an alpaca blanket for $30 and carefully wrapped the honey up in it, and went to the DHL spot here in Arequipa to ship it. The lady there carefully unwrapped it and said no to the honey. She actually spoke English, so she explained that they can’t send it stateside because it’s a US Customs rule. At this point I’m guessing I’d have an easier time shipping a brick of cocaine to the US from South America. Sadly, I barely have room in my pack for the honey, I definitely don’t have room for the blanket I bought. So, had to go ahead and ship that. Cost: $130. Good. God. So I’m in for $160 on a failed plan to get this honey back stateside. The annoying part is I personally don’t even like honey. This really is entirely for a friend. At this point I’m just going to continue to carry it with me country to country until some country decides to confiscate it. And if I do successfully get it back to the states my friend will forever have to introduce me to people as his “honey mule”, without providing any context for it.
So those were my two missions for the day. 50/50 on completion.
Still don’t really have much in the way of ideas for other things to do here. Went back to the plaza de armas and took pictures of the cathedral during the golden hour. Also, note to self. Don’t use the polarizing filter on the wide angle lens when you have the lens full wide, it’s very noticeable in the sky.
And also the plaza itself
Went to the Mercado San Camilo
Bought nothing, tho it was fun to wander through and look.
Went to the plaza de yanahurah because it has a viewpoint of the volcano Misti.
At 19,000+ feet it definitely towers over this town. Note, those are clouds, it’s not venting.
Other than that I mostly just walked around aimlessly.
One of the things I do want to do is go hike through the Ruta del Sillar, which is the quarry where all the stone used for the town came from, and which has a bunch of interesting rock carvings. But, there’s no public transportation there. And although taxis and uber will take you there, my hotel consierge says they will not come back to get you (glad I asked that question rather than finding out the hard way). And this place is a 45 minute drive away, so it’s certainly not something im going to be walking. That leaves guided tours, and I’m not paying $40 to be rushed through a place that I’m not $40 worth of interested in.
I dunno. I’m here for another day. I have no idea what to do with it. I can safely say I enjoyed Cusco a lot more than Arequipa. Don’t regret coming here. But my original plan for just spending a single day here was probably fine.
