I have no idea what the problem was. I asked several people why the whole town was on strike and all I got was "the government." I just know it's a pain.

I first found out yesterday after arriving in Arequipa and waiting eight hours for a bus to Tacna. That was when I was told it wasn't leaving. Because of the vuelga, thay said. (If that's how you spell it.) What the hell's a vuelga, I ask? A strike, they said. Supposedly it was gonna be over last night so the overnight bus was still running to Tacna. So I waited another six hours and took a night bus for the second straight night.

"Panicked screaming and pounding."
The trip in itself was rather exciting. I'm sitting in the front seat and am awakened in the middle of the night to the stomach-wrenching sounds of panicked screaming and pounding coming

Arequipa's Volcano Looms Behind the City

from the rear of the bus. I thought, "Oh great. The bus is on fire again." I got a little nervous because I'd noted earlier that I was sitting next to a window that didn't open and that the door between the passenger compartment and the driver was bolted from the other side. As I made preparations to batter down the door, I figured out that somebody'd freaked out that the driver was going too fast in the mountain fog. I peeked out the piece of non-curtained window into the front of the bus and indeed, we were rocketing over a mountain road through fog so thick I could see only about two worn yellow lines ahead of us on the road. He didn't slow down.

Also, there was the lovely half hour where the bus had stopped for the driver to go eat. It's was about one am and women selling snacks and drinks stood at the door to the bus yelling "gaseosas! pollo! gaseosas!" I wanted to murder them.

"It feels rather tense."
So around five am we arrive in Tacna and I ask where the buses are that cross the border to Chile. I am laughed at. There are no buses, they say. Why, I ask. Because of the vuelga, they say. Great. So I get in a cab to a hotel and wake up the manager to get a room before dawn and go to sleep. Later in the morning I venture out into a situation that reminds me of Cincinnati during the race riots in 2001. There are no cars on the streets.

Strikers Take Over Downtown Tacna

Some stores are open, but they have the gates most of the way down so as to close quickly if things get out of hand. People are milling around but it feels rather tense.

Then in the afternoon things really get going. I think I slept through most of it, but I'm awakened around five by electrically amplified yelling. I stumble up to the roof to look out onto the city's main square. There are hundreds of people with banners and such listening to somebody shout things I can't understand. They seem reasonably subdued, though and around six they marched off somewhere else leaving the city perfectly intact. More than I can say for certain protesters in the US.

"It just looks so cool."
So I'm still deciding if I'm gonna go down to Chile tomorrow. It'll be quite a tight schedule if I do, but who knows. I looked at the observatory's web site tonight for directions and the photos of it just look so cool. I think I'll try to go.