City of White Churches

We arrived in Arequipa at 5.30am after a sleepless 10 hour bus ride from Cusco.  I had almost memorised the lines from Fast and Furious 3 (in Spanish!) as it was playing on a loop during the whole trip.  I thought our bus driver was trying to emulate the characters in the movie as he negotiated the twists and turns in the darkness of the Peruvian landscape.   We met a cool American gal and followed her to Los Andes Hostal near the Plaza de Armas (which marks the centre of every Peruvian city).  I was in a zombie-state and was still suffering from post-Salkantay stomach pains so we waited in the hostal lounge until our room was ready.  We slept until 2pm in an attempt to get over the bus-lag. 

Arequipa means ¨Stop a while¨in Quechua as its what one of the Incan chiefs decided to do on his way to Cusco.  It´s a great place to chill out, with it´s beautiful  white-stoned colonial architecture (built from the white volcanic stone giving it the name of the ¨White City¨) against the backdrop of Mount Misti and other volcanoes.  It´s Peru´s second largest city and while it has many tourist amentities, feels more like a functional (normal) town than Cusco.  Definitely a great place to chill after the hard Salkantay trek.

Next day we joined a ´bus tour´to the Colca Canyons.  The Colca Canyons are supposedly the deepest canyons in the world, more so than the Grand Canyon in Colorado.  We wanted to originally trek to the Canyons but weren´t too keen on the 1am start from Arequipa.  Anyway, it was a mistake to take the bus tour as we sat on the bus the whole day, only getting off for about 5mins at different villages to take some photos.  It was armchair travelling, sanitised, with no interaction with the environment or people.  The land was very dry and harsh and there were some interesting scenes but not anything too fascinating. The Colca Canyon route was also littered with other tours and we were constantly bumping into other tour groups.  The highlight of the first day was the La Caldera hot springs where we met up with Crystal and Josh (from the Arequipa hostal) and also met Mateo (an Italian doctor who speaks perfect English).  We met up with them later for dinner instead of going to the touristy folk dance show.  It was freezing in the evening and we were staying at a really crappy cabana with no heating.  I had hung out my swimmers and towel on a line outside and my towel was so frozen that it felt like cardboard in the morning.  You can imagine how cold we were that night eventhough the tour operator had told us that it wouldn´t be cold at all.  Trust noone!

Next morning we again hopped on the bus to see some Pre-Incan terraces and then to the Cruz de Condor where we could see these magnificent birds.  The condors are so graceful, swooping and gliding through the air.  Oh how I wish I could be a condor!  After that we walked for about 30mins above the canyon, taking photos of the deep gorge.  I think the trek would have been much more satisfying as you would hike in the canyon.  It was a quite a boring tour and I vow never to do a bus tour again (until I´m 70 at least!)  Anyway we had lunch and then a 3 hour bus ride back to Arequipa.

I was really glad to be back in Arequipa and excited to meet up with the frenchies (Antoine and Christophe) from our Salkantay trek.  They were leaving for France the next day and we had a narrow window of opportunity to catch up.  We ended up meeting up with a big group for a typcial ¨Pre-Incan¨ feast (Crystal, Josh, Mateo and the Frenchies) of Cuy (guinea pig), Alpaca steak and ceviche (Peru´s national dish of semi-raw fish marinated in lemon and herbs).  I really enjoyed the Alpaca steak, washed down with Chilean wine.