May 28 - 31 - Where the condors fly

The bus ride to Arequipa was a lot longer than I expected. I should have known though. Lonely Plant had been wrong about the times of every other bus ride I had taken, so it would go without saying that today’s bus ride would be exactly as long as they said. So, needless to say, I didn’t arrive in Arequipa until late in the evening and had to take the first room I found. Even though the price was a little more than I was used to, the hotel was probably one of the cutest ones I have stayed in since leaving. It was a small collection of rooms scattered throughout a collection of alleyways, all painted bright colours. But that was not the highlight of the night. After checking in I headed over to a restaurant highly recommended by Manuel. This East Indian themed restaurant had probably the best mean I have had in my life….a lovely alpaca meat with a coconut milk sauce…delicious (Turk II if anyone wants to go check it out).

The next morning I was forced to change hotels and spend most of the morning taking care of business to prepare my trip to the Cañón del Colca and the rest of my plans for Arequipa. I also got to walk around the town a bit while I searched for everything. Arequipa, like Sucre, is all painted white and filled with small, narrow streets. Interestingly enough, each block actually has a few entrances into the interior maze of courtyards and alleyways. So, within each of the blocks is a small community itself with different homes, courtyards and streets all contained within a few different entrances.

After I got everything organized I decided to visit the Museo Santury, a museum that was recommended by every traveler I met. Even though the museum (associated with the Universidad Católica de Santa Maria) didn’t have very much to offer in terms of artifacts, it did have quite a large display on Juanita, known as the “Ice Princess”. The Inca culture was not known for sacrificing people, but Juanita was one of the very few bodies that have been found sacrificed to the gods. The archeologists have concluded that the only times the Incas sacrificed humans was to appease the gods in the event of natural disasters. In the case of Juanita, she was a 12 year old girl that was raised in Cusco to be a sacrifice to stop an erupting volcano. As she was raised to be a sacrifice, she was treated with the utmost respect and treated like royalty through her life before her walk from Cusco to Arequipa that undoubtedly took months.

The artifacts the Museo Santury displays are those found from the burial site near the summit of Nevado Ampato. As the land was frozen at that altitude, Juanita and all her artifacts stayed frozen for hundreds of years so they could be easily studied by archeologists. Of particular interest to the archeologists was Juanita herself, who was preserved very well in the frozen tundra and is still on display in the museum in a specially built glass freezer in a back room of the museum. It is kind of eerie standing there looking at a frozen woman through the glass, but probably not as shocking as the people who discovered her when they were out for a walk and tripped over her.

The rest of the day I spent relaxing around the city, in particular at the Cusco Coffee Company (Finally a good cup of South American coffee, it just took a while) reading a book and enjoying my last couple of days in South America. I also spent a fair amount of time in the Plaza de Armas. This plaza was probably one of the most beautiful main squares I visited in South America. It has probably one of the longest churches in the world on one side of the plaza and then the others have matching buildings with a terrace on the second floor filled with small restaurants catering to the tourists, but still a lovely place to have a drink and watch the world go by I the plaza below.

The next day I headed off to the Cañón del Colca very early in the morning, or late at night, I’m not sure. All I know is I got up at 1:30 to catch the bus at 2am (which in true South American style was obviously half an hour late), but it gave me enough time to catch a late night snack with all the bar goers who were heading home. I tried to sleep in the bus as it made its way to Chivay, but with no luck. Once we arrived in Chivay we had a very small breakfast to start the day before making our way to the Cruz del Cóndor where we would watch the condors fly.

On the way we stopped at a couple of different towns to check out a market and small church, all of which, though interesting, did not live up to the standards of some of the other things I had seen throughout my travels. But once we made it to the Cruz del Cóndor we were able to see the birds we got up so early in the morning to see. The Cruz del Cóndor is located in the middle of the canyon at a high point on the cliff where there is lots of room below where the condors can live and fly and where it is quite narrow so the birds are close enough to see them. After 2 hours of waiting for the condors to arrive and start their flight, but the wait was well worth it. These large majestic birds were flying so close you could almost touch them. They were so close I could take pictures as they soared above and below me.

As we made our way back through the Cañón del Colca, we were able to see why the Cruz del Cóndor was such an important lookout point: everywhere else the condors were much to high for you to even make out what kind of bird they were. But the drive back through the canyon provided a different level of excitement as we drove through many different types of terrain within the same canyon. By the Cruz del Cóndor we were close to many high cliffs, an area that goes as deep as 3,000m, making the Cañón del Colca the second deepest canyon in the world (the deepest is around 100km to the North-West). But as we made our way back to Chivay we drove through the agricultural landscape that has survived from the pre-Inca times. Because of the steep cliffs in this canyon, the farmers were forced to terrace the entire valley. This terraced landscape was more extensive than anything I had seen before where the agricultural production was limited to only a small portion of the hill, but in this valley, every square inch was being farmed. When you looked down upon the valley it looked like a 3D representation of a topographical map with the contour lines easily recognized. The ability to see these contour lines created some of the most amazing patterns in the valley, but due to the haze of the day, it was impossible to get a good picture of them.

Before heading back to Arequipa, we stopped in Chivay for lunch and a wander around town. Unlike most of the other places I had visited, this tourist town’s market didn’t cater to the tourists at all. Instead, as the capital of the region, it catered more to the local people’s needs, thus creating a more unique market experience. It’s alleys between the stalls were very narrow, and the stalls were some of the smallest I have seen, with everyone concentrating on some need of the locals, from toys for the kids, to pots to clothes, with the food located in another market. There were very few, if any, craft/tourist shops, very refreshing after visiting hundreds of them over the past four months.

The drive from Chivay to Arequipa was slightly more interesting than at 2:00 in the morning, especially since we were able to see some of the landscape, but by this time I had seen enough of the mountainous landscape that it had lost most of it’s interest, especially since I had seen more vibrant landscapes in other parts of South America. The one highlight though was stopping to see the vacuñas, a cousin to the llamas and alpacas. This wild animal provides the softest wool and is among the rarest Andean camel, especially since people have yet to find a way to domesticate them. This makes the wool very sought after and valuable, thus a lucrative business for those who are able to harvest the wool (which is made even more difficult since they are a protected animal). A vacuña wool scarf would cost upwards of $200 in the market, while a baby alpaca scarf (next softest wool) would cost around $8.

The next day was my final day in Arequipa, and practically my last day of travelling since everywhere I was to go from here I had been before. Needless to say, after the long day I had the day before, I didn’t have much energy and spent most of the morning drinking coffee at Cusco Coffee and relaxing around the Plaza de Armas, which suited me just fine since the only thing I had to do before my bus at 9:00 that night was visit the Monasterio de Santa Catalina.

Everyone who visited Arequipa has told me to spend lots of time at the Monasterio de Santa Catalina, and it did not disappoint (this is my official recommendation to visit it if you are ever in Arequipa….definitely one of the coolest places I visited in my whole time in South America). Founded in 1580, the Monasterio de Santa Catalina was an incredibly rich colonial convent which required a substantial dowry paid to the convent in order to have your daughter considered to be a nun there. Because of the high dowry required, only the elite of Spanish families were able to send their daughters there to live as a nun, but the money raised through this requirement provided a lifestyle more like that of a socialite than of a nun. After their mandatory time in solitary confinement that the nuns went through to join the convent, they were catered to by up to four servants (more like slaves) who took care of their every desire. They would eat the best food, have large homes to live in and hold the social events of the city within their walls, inviting musicians to play almost constantly. They were living it up as if they had never left Spain. But after a few hundred years of this, the Pope got wind of what was happening in Arequipa and send a very strict nun to straighten things out. When she arrived she put a stop to all the festivities and turned it into one of the strictest convents in all of South America, and the substantial dowries were sent back to Rome.

Because of all this money available to the convent, they have created one of the most impressive sites in all of Arequipa to visit. Covering an entire city block, the convent has only a few entrances, but once inside the compound the alleys were lined with flowers, brightly colored buildings and more courtyards than you can imagine. Its beauty is so renowned that it is a popular stop for photographers around the world and while I was there was being visited by a group of photographers travelling around Peru. It made for some great opportunities for photos as the other photographers were conscious of the need for clear shots and moved out of the way whenever you wanted to take a picture. This is the first time I have ever had the experience of everyone moving out of the way of my picture without my asking.

After a few hours of walking around the streets of the convent (it’s that large and breathtaking) I spent the rest of the afternoon relaxing around Arequipa absorbing the last little bit of the Andean culture before boarding my overnight bus to Lima (I think it should be noted here that the departure lounge for Cruz del Sur in Arequipa would rival any executive class lounge for the top airlines at any airport in the world….talk about gorgeous….and a refreshing break from some of the dirtiest bus stations I will ever see in my life).