Arequipa - The White City

As close as we got to the Nazca lines!
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After breaking up the 14 hour bus ride with a stop in Nazca (home of the famous Nazca lines) we arrived in Arequipa and settled into our new home, the Los Andes hostal.

We were lucky to arrive at all and even luckier to still have our reservation after our bus got cancelled due to lack of passengers and I had to ring the hostal and let them know (in my best Spanglish) that we would not be arriving until 1 or 2 in the morning.

Somehow I managed to make some sense to the guy on the other end of the phone using my Spanglish skills but he was laughing at me through most of the conversation (which seems to be happening a lot lately).

Plaza de Armas- Arequipa style
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Arequipa is Peru's second largest city and is watched over by the El Misti volcano which makes for a pretty spectacular site with the city nestled below! It of course has a Plaza de Armas, just like all the other cities we have visited so far, which is where the cathedral is located.

We spent most of our first day visiting the beautiful Monasterio Santa Catalina. The monastery is like a little city inside a city and was only opened to the public in 1970. It took us about 4 hours to make our way through the complex but it was worth every minute and they had English explanation panels all the way through, so we actually knew what we were looking at for once. I think we took more photos in there than anywhere else on our trip so far!

Monasterio hallway
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We then decided to start looking around for tour companies to book our trek to Cañon de Colca. After about 5 minutes of looking around we were over it and decided to check out a place which had a big sign out the front saying 'Hi mate, come in and see us. We are the same, same but different!' We knew we had made the right decision when we saw that the Peruvian guy at the desk was wearing a VB hat!

It turned out that he loved Australia and Australians and wanted to live in Melbourne and had tried three times to get a working visa without success and was now working on the 'marrying an Aussie girl' angle. Good luck to him!

Monasterio steps
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After running the gauntlet of hawkers trying to entice us to their restaurants we settled on the safe option and had dinner at a little café in the centre of town. It turned out be a great choice as my dinner consisted of a plate of chopped up sausages called salchipapas with a chicken hamburger, bacon and an egg all served on top of bed of fries!

A perfect end to a fantastic day!