We flew from Cusco, in highland Peru, to Arequipa, on the coastal plain. A flight was very luxurious after so many buses, but it does mean that we cannot truthfully say we have completed coast to coast across South America overland. Still, we won´t tell anyone about one little flight if you won´t!
Arequipa is the second biggest city in Peru, and is in a dry dusty landscape, but at the foot of three snow-capped mountains (all about 6000m high, one, El Misti being a perfect cone-shaped volcano) so is in quite a spectacular setting. The people of Arequipa are fiercely proud and there are on going debates about its independence from Peru.
From Arequipa, we took a two day tour into the nearby Colca Canyon. We had been very excited reading that the canyon is the second deepest on earth (the deepest being just ´up the road´ and 170m deeper) and over twice as deep as the Grand Canyon. We were also looking forward to Condor watching (the birds have wingspans from 2 to a massive 4 metres). However, despite a trip into canyon-like scenery (with extensive and impressive pre-Inca terracing) the 2 main highlights of the Canyon area were disappointingly kept hidden from us. The first, the deepest part of the canyon, we were denied simply because the tour we had been taken on did not travel the further 2 hours up a dirt track to get to the maximum 3.4km drop between the top of the canyon sides and the river bed (the deepest we saw was 1500m, about the height of the Grand Canyon). Boo!
The second highlight, the Condors, didn´t come out because they were otherwise engaged in their nests. That´s right - we´d managed to visit at the one time of year when they don´t bother coming out to stretch their wings because they are mating! But that didn´t stop us having to get up at 5am just incase one of them had a headache. So, we sat forlornly staring across from one side of the canyon to to other, at a lookout point called cruelly, ´Condor View´, with coach-loads of all the other unlucky tourists. To pass the time we played around with some postcards (see photos) and Darren successfully tricked other members of our group that we had seen a condor, and taken an award winning photo of it (when in fact we just took a photo of the postcard). How we laughed. The Condor watching trip brought back painful memories of the whale watching debacle!!
All wasn´t lost though, as it was a fantastic view of the canyon, and we did infact catch a glimpse of a baby condor (without the distinctive white band round its neck) flying right by us, and got a prolonged view of a large eagle. As if coming out for the cameras in a suspiciously animatronic way, the eagle flapped lazily along the canyon side and landed on an outcrop just metres away from a crowd of onlookers. We had, typically, just walked away from that area and so viewed everything happening from the next outlook through our snazzy monocular (thanks Simon!). People started running from all over the area, maybe risking their lives along the steep cliff paths, to get a close up view and snap of the said Eagle. It was all rather frantic and crowd hysteria-like. They needn´t have hurried though. The eagle proceeded to sit on the outcrop for at least the next 45 minutes, opening up it´s wings to warm up, or dry out, in the sun. It looked decidely odd, as it if were wearing a rain mac and was surreptiously showing his dodgy watches for sale inside the flaps!
On the way to the canyon, we saw herds of Vicunas framed by more volcanoes. Vicunas are llama´s undomesticated relative and have the finest animal fibre in the world (hence got almost hunted to extinction a while back). According to our guide, a vicuna-hair sweater would set you back $10,000 in the US.
Back in Arequipa we had a free day before our final night bus in South America (Yes!!) that evening. We spent most of the day in an Irish bar (Darren teaching Angie to play pool, Angie showing Darren how to excel at scrabble) but did manage to do some cultural stuff first. We visited Santa Catalina convent which is a walled city within a city. It was home to hundreds of nuns from 18 to 95 years of age and until 1970 was isolated from the outside world for almost 400 years. They used to take in goods through turnstiles in the wall and communicate when they had to through double barred wooden windows. The convent has its own streets, accomodation, cemetery, courtyards, kitchens, communal areas, hospital, church etc. It is now open to the public (for a hefty entrance fee) to wander the cobbled alleyways and see the Moorish/Spanish style architecture painted in deep reds and blues. Today only 30 nuns still live in the convent and they have retreated to one corner and still have no contact with the public, apart from cooking tasty pies that are on sale in the cafe (strangely, beer was on sale too?!). However, we went up onto the roof and watched them hanging out washing in their little blue uniforms - caught ya!
Arequipa was a semi-paradise for us, having almost more vegetarian restaurants than Brighton. They serve a great variety of traditional and international dishes with different types and flavours of soya meat substituting real meat. It´s very strange that in Brazil, the biggest producer of soya beans in the world, we got not a sniff of soya meat or tofu, but in Peru, the land of potato and corn, it seems to be reasonably commonplace. Still, it kept us happy and off the pizza for a few days!
One other thing of note in Arequipa is the traffic, or rather the drivers. They are incredibly impatient and just seem to permanently have their hand on the horn, so to speak. This is not helped by the road layout - the city is built on a grid system, but there are no traffic lights or priority signs at the junctions. Drivers just have to jostle for position, criss-crossing the junction in all different directions at once. Most drivers solve this problem by letting everyone know they are coming from half a block away. Even when not at junctions if they have to slow down, because a taxi has pulled up to the side of the road for instance, it´s just constantly beeeeep beeeeeeeeeeep beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep. Ooooh it made Angie scowl at them! It´s quite hard being a pedestrian here, as you can imagine.
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