We were up in the opening moments of the day yet again to be picked up for our tour. ‘Morning’ here seems to count as 6am, rather than the more noon-ish hour I am accustomed to. The ever-helpful chaps in the hotel made us an early breakfast before it was even officially being served, and kept our rucksacks for us so we could take off with small backpacks. The bus came approximately on time, and off we went.
I haven’t done very much of the guided tour kind of tourism, and I don’t think I have ever done it in a place where you didn’t have to just to be there, like Libya, so I was curious to see how it would all go. We had initially looked into making our way to the canyon using standard public transport, but that seemed like it would be more trouble than it would be worth, hence the tour bus.
The guide said we were to call him Peter, and he kept up a steady patter in both Spanish in English. The other people on the bus were a varied crew – some very-early-twenties Brazillian girls, a Polish couple who had been to lots of places and climbed several significant mountains, and who we got on with very welll, an American chap called Karl who may well be reading this, a German couple in their 50s, of which the wife got very sick from altitude, a Swiss couple who didn’t say too much. Overall it had the makings of a decent Agatha Christie story.
Our destination for the first day was a town called Chivay, roughly 130km outside of Arequipa, but over roads of very varying quality. We made lots of stops along the way, and saw vicunas, llamas and alpacas. We were able to get close enough to get some great pictures, as none of them were that far off the road. Signs warn of their presence like deer in Phoenix Park. I have a patchy record at telling the three apart, but Katie has it down. For some of the stops we had the particularly volcano-looking volcano called Misti in the background, and it felt we were very far away from anything familiar.
The journey didn’t feel long. We stopped for a buffet lunch in a roadside place on the way, in which I tested several mystery meats, and reached Chivay in the afternoon. There was the opportunity for a short hike, which we turned down (I am still, annoyingly, a bit weak), but we took up the chance to go to hot springs just outside the town.
Neither Katie or I had ever been to hot springs before, and there was much amusement among the others at our reactions. I didn’t know quite what to expect – I had kind of thought it might be a natural pool like a small lake you could swim in. Instead, it’s a complex with a series of swimming pools, except that instead of a normal temperature the water in each one is around 40C, and all of the heating comes from underground geothermal energy. So it provides the curious effect that something that is usually reasonably precious even in the western world – hot water – is abundant and used in unusual quantities. It was a very strange feeling to slide into the warm-hot water of the outdoor pool and duck under the surface, and I can entirely see what the Romans were up to when they made that such a part of day to day life for the upper classes. It was lovely to sit and soak for an hour and splash about and look up at the surrounding mountains and feel the heat on every part of your body.
That evening we went for dinner in a place where there was much tourist-friendly dancing and music, probably the Chivay equivalent of the Oliver St John Gogarty in Temple Bar. I was happy enough to get away from it, though we had good dinnertime conversation with the others. The next morning was another very early start – 5am this time.
Colca Canyon is an enourmous hole in the ground, twice as deep as the Grand Canyon in the US. However, it looks less like a hole and more like a valley, as there is not a defined rim to it. But it’s a place of spectacular beauty – terraced mountains and the river and rugged cliffs all mingle together on a massive scale. We were headed to a place where condors ride the hot air rising from the canyon below, and therefore are quite close to the tourists watching from the canyon edge.
However. We stopped several times on the way to the viewing point, at places that I was not entirely convinced were worth stopping for, listening to explanations that did not entirely make sense to me, and by the time we got to the viewing point one condor was in place, hanging in the air, being snapped by all the assembled tourists. By the time we were out of the bus, he was gone. We waited another hour and a half or so, but never saw another one that close.
I will admit that I was not amused. Given that we were up so early we could have been in great time to see any condors that presented themselves, even though this is not the season for them to appear, it seemed we wasted a lot of time. I dearly wished that we had our own transport. And that feeling was magnified by the fact that bus after bus after bus was rolling up the same road to the same tourist stops. And at each stop were women and girls (hardly any men, for whatever reason) dressed in traditional garb trying to sell you the same thing you had seen at the last stop.
I felt very sorry for them. And it was the same at every town we came to. We made several stops, maybe four in total, and in each place the routine was the same. The bus pulled up beside all the other buses, and everyone got out. The people in the traditional dress descended and tried to sell you whatever it was they were selling, or get you to take a picture with them, or to pet their baby llama (which is bigger than you would expect) or whatever. After a short time another bus would pull up, and the locals would move on to that one.
Each town was built on much the same plan – a square, a few streets, a church – thanks to the Spanish, who thought that having everyone living all over the place was a bit difficult to manage, and so pulled them together into a limited number of villages. (Fourteen, I think.) It was impossible from our position to even see an outline of what local life might be like there now.
On the last stop or two I didn’t even want to get out, but did anyway. I was very glad to be on the road back to Arequipa, and spent the few hours dozing and reading in my seat in the very back corner of the bus. Both Katie and I essentially read a full book over the course of the trip. Mine was the late Michael Crichton’s last, and possibly his most forgettable, called Pirate Latitudes. I left it with one of the guys in the hotel who had been so helpful to us, and he seemed pleased to get it.
We got back into Arequipa about 4pm, rested for a bit, and then went out for a walk around. There was much more local life there than we had seen on the tour. Sitting on the benches in the park are old men with typewriters, and for a fee they will type up a letter for you. And also in the main square we saw a preacher-type person roaring what I can only assume was fire and brimstone at the people who stayed to watch and anyone who happened to pass within 20 yards or so. And we saw a formal and official ceremony where they took down the flags from the flagpoles in the square, which included quite a lot of people and soldiers and a complex folding choreography, like you see with the American flag when they move it around in an official capacity.
It was actually really nice to be back and I began to regret my earlier misgivings about the city. We went out for dinner in a moderately cheap and somewhat cheerful place, and then were back in the hotel early.
The following day, which is now yesterday, we were out reaonably early. We went to see the Museum of Arequipa, which was dominated by naval things and was clearly meant for boys rather than girls, and then to a religious museum run by Franciscans. This turned out to be a hidden gem of sorts. We were shown around by a young woman who spoke moderate English, and who unlocked all the doors from a large set of keys. I got the feeling they don’t get too many visitors. She showed us a small library which contained maybe a thousand volumes of varying ages, and a room where they keep the clothes which they use to dress the statue in the main church. There was a central sun-filled cloister, and the end of the tour was a gallery of Cusco Scool masterpieces which seem to be falling away to nothing. One of them was an image of the devil and some rather miserable punter that I can still see very clearly in my mind. Insects are included. Eesh.
We went for lunch in the same somewhat-cheerful place as before, and ran into Karl from our tour group. So after we had eaten the three of us set off to see if we could find a bridge built by Gustave Eiffel, of the tower fame. We had a map and knew where it was and decided to walk, and it was a very nice stroll through parts of the city that we might otherwise not have seen. And which made me glad it was daylight. Anyway, we got to a point where we could see the bridge in the distance, but couldn’t seem to get any closer. Karl spoke some Spanish and he asked people how to get there, and they said we had to go quite a long way back and around.
Near where we were was a bridge that was finished in the sense it provided a solid platform over the river, but unfinished in that there was no road leading from the other side. And it was still a few feet above the road surface level on the side we were on. Anyway. We hopped up on it and walked over to the other side with the aim of taking pictures of the Eiffel bridge and going back when three dogs appears from the bushes, running towards us and barking in a not-very-friendly manner.
Katie saw them first and called out. I looked up, and didn’t move. Karl did the most useful thing – he ran forward and picked up two large rocks from a pile at the end of the bridge.
The dogs heard the sound of the stones moving against each other and stopped immediately, well out of range. They must be used to what that means. We backed off slowly, and they disappeared back into the bushes, and we congratulated ourselves on our escape. Well done Karl.
We walked back into the centre and went to an old colonial house called Casa de Moral, which was nice – very high ceilings, wooden floors, old furniture. You could go up on the roof and get a great view of the volcanoes in the distance and the rooves of the town. I noted that if there was to be an earhtquake or an erruption during our visist, that would have been the moment for it. But neither presented itself. So we went back into town and had a look at the main cathedral, which was vast but somehow underwhelming, and then said our goodbyes to Karl. Katie and I had something to eat and headed back to the hotel, then went from there to get the night bus back to Cusco.
It’s now 4.30pm on Jan 18 as I write this in a very nice hostel in Cusco, not far from one of the squares where we ate last time we were here. Thunder is rumbling and crashing outside. This is the third time we have come back to Cusco, as things have turned out. We were very tired getting off the bus and so slept here for a while, then went out and had a look around the shops. I got an Alpaca scarf in preparation for the Antarctic, though that is a while away yet. I also went to a pharmacy and got another round of antibiotics, should I need them; they are freely available here, and I had the old perscription to make it easy anyway. I got painkillers too while I was there. Load up on drugs and write your blog, as it were.
We had lunch in a really lovely restaraunt nearby, recommendedin the guidebook but not recommended nearly highly enough. This evening we are going to go and have a look at a pre-Columbian art musuem, which is open late.
Tomorrow morning we fly to Lima, and then from there to Quito, so it is goodbye to Peru. The day after, we have a very early flight to the Galapagos Islands, and from there turtles and beaches and birds await.
