Arequipa

Wednesday was a national holiday, so I decided to travel to Arequipa, a city I´ve really been wanting to see. Arequipa is in the south of Peru and is the second largest city (after Lima, of course) with a population of 1 million. The flight was surprisingly inexpensive (only $54 each way before taxes), so I opted for that instead of the more popular 15-hour bus ride, but because so many people were traveling for the holiday, not everyone I traveled with could get on the same flight. When I first arrived, I rested for a while because I spent the night before celebrating Stephanie´s birthday. Our hotel was a little weird, mostly because every wall was a different color; in the first room we stayed in, one wall was red, one wall was white, one wall was covered in absurd postcards, and the last wall was splatter painted red and looked like someone had died against that wall. Once everyone had arrived, we ate lunch/dinner at a delicious Mexican restaurant and scoped out the city, namely the Plaza de Armas (because every Peruvian city has one).

The next day, my friend Jeremy insisted on doing a tour with the taxi driver / tour guide that had driven him from the airport to the hotel the day before. Jeremy had talked about this guy so much that we had to take the tour just to see if he lived up to all the hype, and after 5 hours with him, I think he most definitely did. After breakfast, we met up with Telmo who first took us to a famous chocolate factory and the Plaza de Armas, and then we quickly escaped downtown Arequipa because it was really trafficy from some sort of workers´protest. We drove around to all of the suburbs and outskirts of the city. We went to 3 miradores, which are like view points; one to see a view of all of the city, one to see a view of the country, and one to see a view of the volcanoes not too far away. We also went to a really cool water-powered mill and the city founder´s house that was taken over by the Chilean army during the war. Then, we tried lots of different food, including queso helado (an Arequipeñan desert), special papaya that only grows in Arequipa, and a picantería (a restaurant that serves Arequipeñan food). Telmo spent most of the time making Kung Fu noises, calling cars that cut him off Limeñan, talking to manicans, and explaining more than I could ever want to know about Arequipa. He dropped us off at an artisan market, and we spent the rest of the day shopping.

On Friday we booked a tour, as per Telmo´s recommendation, to see Colca canyon, which is a huge canyon that is deeper than the Grand Canyon. The bus came to pick us up at 7:30am, and we began our journey; everyone says Colca is in Arequipa, but actually it´s a 6-hour bus ride. We stopped 3 times en route; once at a national reserve to obeserve vicuñas, once in a small typical andian town, and once to look at llamas and alpacas. We ate lunch in a town called Chivay, about an hour away from the canyon before heading to a 2-hour trek across part of the canyon and natural hot springs. We returned to Chivay to check into our hotel and eat dinner at a really small peña that featured 3 native andian dances. We spent a lot of time with the other people in our group, mainly a girl from Australia that was studying abroad in Chile and a group of 4 from Barcelona, Spain.

We woke up the next morning at 5am to head to the canyon. We got up so early to see the famous condors that fly around, and supposedly the best time to watch them is around 7am and they all leave by 11am (which is why we had to make our visit to the canyon and overnight venture). En route to the watchig point called Cruz del Condor, we got stuck in a huge traffic jam of tourist buses because some rocks had fallen down and blocked the road. Once they cleared the road and we arrived, we saw about 10 condors and about 10,000 tourists. Around 10:30am, we headed back to Chivay for lunch then headed back to Arequipa. We got back to Arequipa around 4:30, checked back into our hotel, and were assigned a new room, this time with really creepy clowns on the walls. We went back to the artisan market and the chocolate factory for more souveniors and ate a late dinner at a delicious crepes restaurant (I had a chicken, pineapple, and cheese crepe that was so yummy). Our flight the next morning was so early that we had to wake up at 4am, so we made it an early night. I spent the rest of the day Sunday resting and trying to recuperate from getting up so early for so many days!