Arequipa

There are two main reasons we stopped in Arequipa: Colca Canyon and Juanita the Ice Maiden. Also, we took some respite here. It is really a beautiful city, clean, relatively easy to get around. And the altitude here is lower than Cusco, which is good, but it also has the climate of a desert, so it is very dry.

We arrived in the early evening, and we knew the next morning was going to be an early one. After a little dinner, we chilled at the hostel, played a little ping pong, and went to sleep early.

At about 3:30AM the next morning, a buys picked us up. By bus I mean large van with small seats, all of which were filled. It was a sardine packed ride. Most people slept until we got to Chavay, which is where we had breakfast. The altitude was noticeable. We had gone up about 3,000 feet. We were in Colca Canyon. Or next stop was one we had all been waiting for: the flight of the condor. They are huge! And beautiful and awesome. We stopped at some other viewing points along the way, as well. This is one of the deepest canyons in the world, but we never made it to the deepest part.

After lunch back in Chavay, we headed back to Arequipa, arriving around 5, exhausted. Another evening of ping pong and rest.

The following two days were mostly down time. We are kind of hitting a wall and looking forward to being back home. But we did go see the most well preserved human the world: Juanita. She was a sacrifice made by the Incas about 550 years ago. She had been buried at the summit of a volcano, and the temperature kept her completely in tact. She still had her hair, her internal organs, even much of her skin. Researchers have been able to learn so much from her. It was not intentional, her mummification. Several other children sacrifices were doing on the same mountain and on others. And she was found totally by chance. The volcano had a small eruption, and the ash melted some of the snow, exposing her. Vulcanists were climbing up to study the activity, and basically stumbled across her. She had rolled down about 100 meters from her original burial site, but fortunately remained as perfect as she has been. Basically, she was an ice ball. Anyway, she now rests in a freezer in a museum where everyone can observe her. It's kind of awesome. I had to get a picture off the internet because we weren't allowed to take photos in the museum.

We visited our last market in Peru. It's much cheaper here than in Chile, where everything is significantly more pricey. Still manageable, not like Paris or London expensive, but Peru is so cheap, and we got used to it.

On Thursday morning we caught a bus from Arequipa to Tacna. There, we got a collectivo to Arica, a town just over the border from Peru to Chile. We drove through the desert, for a stamp for exiting Peru, drove a little more, then got a stamp for entering Chile. We landed at a bus terminal that, as it turned out, is right down the road from our hostel. More about Arica in the next post!