Our next stop was in Arequipa, Peru's second-largest city, but described as its most beautiful. Indeed, it is gorgeous, being built almost entirely out of a white volcanic rock, and thankfully chock full of great restaurants and shops. Don't underestimate the importance of a good selection of international-style restaurants; there are only so many times you can eat meat and rice, or an undercooked pizza for that matter. In fact, in Arequipa we had what was definitely one of my best meals on our trip: ostrich steaks and other exotic flavours at a French-Peruvian restaurant, accompanied by fabulous Chilean wine, all at the cost of a single entrée back home.
Apart from doing a little shopping in some antique shops and visiting a village-sized convent, our only other stop was to the nearby Colca Canyon, the deepest in the world. Our goal was to see one of the great Andean Condors, a gigantic vulture with a wing-span of about three meters, and that features in much of Andean mythology. I had been promised that we'd maybe see one of just the few hundred that remain on just about every excursion I'd been on, so at this point I felt I had to see one. Due to a very unfortunate bus schedule this meant boarding at 1:00am, traveling six hours to Cruz del Condor (a popular viewpoint over the canyon where they're often spotted), then returning the same day to Arequipa to then head towards Bolivia. It was an awful, long and bumpy trip, but we were the first ones on the scene, and did see a bunch of them gliding around, so the verdict after the fact was that it was well worth the pain... all for some birds that will eat anything that's rotting.
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