Last days of the South American adventure

The days in La Paz wound down quickly with great laughs. S. and I had some fun staying at the Loki La Paz where we shared a dorm with 4 English blokes and 1 San Franciscan dude. Let's just say that there was a lot of laughing going on.

During those couple of days it was also a parade of all the uni students performing dances from different regions of Bolivia; the streets were packed with dances, live music, drunken debauchery, and the inevitable street food.

On Sunday afternoon we tackled our bus ride back to the Peruvian coast that was due to be 24hrs long...
We left La Paz well prepared to tackle the upcoming day of travel. After a quick jaunt across the border in Desaguadero (and the funniest border agent that I have ever met!), S. and I continued along on our bus journey northwest.

Towards nightfall we started traversing the Andes towards Arequipa and somewhere between Juliaca (by Lake Titicaca) and Arequipa, our bus came to a dead stop.
It turned out that there was heaps of snow on the road and being Sunday, there was no one to clean the roads. We were informed that we were going to have to wait it out... all night long... We quickly started thinking about travel time and whether or not we were going to be able to make a day trip to the National Park of Paracas located just south of Lima. Time wore on and we were still parked on the road with many other cars, trucks and buses.
Morning broke and we awoke to the most beautiful sight. Hills and mountains all around us with a covering of snow on everything. Then the good news came: traffic is starting to move, us included!

We start inching our way up the hill and start passing a stationary truck when *CRUNCH!* We all try to see what has just happened and one of the other passengers calls out that we have just lost our door as it was left open when we started moving and it got ripped off as we passed the truck!!
Now S. and I are thinking a few different things:
1) we have no door
2) it is still lightly snowing outside
3) we are 3/4 hrs away from Arequipa, the closest place for us to change buses
4) the bathroom is right next to this door
5) what is going on?!
After some consulting with the bus driver, the whole bus agrees that we are okay with heading all the way to Arequipa without a door as long as we change buses there since it's another 16 hrs to Lima afterwards.

Off again we go with nightfall once again upon us when *CRASH*, we have just hit something! For those of us in the middle of the bus, we can't figure out if we have hit another vehicle or an animal or a rock. We really don't want to spend another night stopped on the road, especially since we were running 17hrs behind schedule. Turns out that it was a rock and that it didn't do much damage, so off we go once again.

38 hours after we left La Paz, S. and I arrive in Lima at 6am on Tuesday morning. We decide to skip Paracas as it would have been a tight timeline and we would have been dead tired from all of the traveling in the end.

The two days in Lima were well spent. We took our friend's advice and stayed at the EuroBackpackers Hostel in Miraflores that we definitely recommend to anyone heading to Lima, two thumbs up!

We had a bit of an eventful taxi ride to the airport where the driver had a bout of road rage, or maybe he thought that he was a derby driver, and we had to have some words with him in order to arrive at the airport in one piece.

Now here I am, sitting in the Toronto airport, waiting for my flight home. This is the final leg of this journey and after 19 hours of travel/transit time I am very excited to be coming home to the heat wave that is sweeping the city; hello Vancouver!