Lima

By far and away the most interesting site we saw in Lima was the monastery.  I never knew that they could be so interesting!  Much to our dismay no photos were allowed anywhere within the monastery... this physically hurt when we were in the library.  But let me start at the beginning.  You are given a 'free' tour of the monastery (probably to make sure you stay where you are supposed to and don't take any photos), on our tour were us and a New Zealand guy who had been travelling around South America for 7 months.   The library houses around 24000 books, dating back to the 1100s and it is like every ancient library you have imagined.  In fact we suspect it has been used in a few movies.  The ancient texts, the spiral staircases leading up to the higher shelves, shafts of light coming in through the skylights with dust spiralling and the whole library built out of carved cedar polished till it shone. Ah.... beautiful.  From there we headed through the  elaborately carved chorister section, past paintings, through courtyards until eventually we reached the catacombs, where bones are piled in 4 meter deep pits.  What seemed very odd to us was that the bones were in coffins until the 1950s when they were taken out, according to our guide, to make it into a tourist attraction.  Weird.

Colca Canyon Condors

We left Ariquipa for a couple of days to do a quick trip to the Colca Canyon.  Which ever company we went with would likely prove irrelevant as here as elsewhere in South America there are far more tour booking offices then actual tour companies (despite claims by every agent that the bus is theirs!)

The tour involved a long bus trip to Chivay with a couple of stops to medicate ourselves with Coca (yes that’s coca not cocoa) in the form of sweets, tea or just chewing the leaves.  This is meant to help alleviate the symptoms of altitude sickness (and if you believe the hype stop you needing to eat, sleep, drink, keep you alert and any number of other side effects.. of course that sounds more like the effects from the processed form to me).  As we approached the high point on the road, marked by the thousands of small cairns of rock, each of which represents a wish made, we discovered one of the members of our party wasn’t handling the altitude very well.  We reached 4900m  the highest point we have ever attempted to walk  and we were both out of breath after just a few steps. We were a bit worried for the woman as she was planning to continue upward after the tour to do the Inca trail.  We were  grateful that we had spent the last 3 days at 2600m in Areiquipa so we had acclimatised a little.  (We suspect we went higher on the bus trip between Salta and San Pedro de Attacama but we sat the whole way for that.) 

From there we made our way down into the township of Chivay a spectacularly green valley after the barrenness of the road that we had journeyed along.  We were fortunate enough to see some of the local dancing in the town centre that we suspect was put on for one of the more expensive tours, (our organised dancing for dinner was somewhat less inspired).

Waking up for the second time the next day (our five o’clock wake up call was actually delivered at 1am!!!) we bundled into the bus to the Colca canyons.  We played the part of tourists on the way even paying to hold a hawk and take some photos.  Arriving a little early we walked up the path to the Condor view point that most tours take on the way out,  having it to ourselves was beautiful and relaxing.  Reaching the view point we were given two hours for the main event.  We hadn’t expected much as the photos in all the tour agents led us to suspect the condors wouldn’t come within 30 meters of us,  We were incredibly surprised as the morning went on different groups of condors would rise up on thermals out of the canyon some of which came well within 2 meters of us.  We spent a very happy two hours snapping pictures and enjoying the flight of the condors and other birds, the only disappointment was the “Traditional music” that a group of locals would play for the tourists disrupting the tranquillity of the place far more than the quantity of watchers would have.

Nuns... with servants

The highlight of Arequipa is the Monasteria de Santa Catelina.  The convent was founded in 1579, 40 years after the arrival of the Spanish to Arequipa.  Initially most of the nuns came from rich families and so the convent is a little more elaborate than you might expect as the nuns weren’t quite willing to give up their previous life.  There was however a pronouncement by the bishop sometime in the 1600s limiting each nun to only one servant.  The convent is absolutely beautifully and a warren of small streets and smaller rooms, with kitchens littered around everywhere.  Different sections of the convent show different periods of architecture as the convent has been built in sections, and occasionally destroyed by an earthquake.  There are currently 30 nuns still living their and the section they are in was built in the 1960s and is completely different to the sections that are open to tourists.   The nuns agreed with us in terms of where to eat, as on our last night eating at our favourite restaurant in Arequipa, there was a group of 6 nuns eating at the next table!

Explosions and Buses

We have now journeyed from Iquique Chile to Arequipa Peru, deciding that doing the trip in stages would preserve our sanity a little better we paused a night in Tacna. We departed Iquique early on a bus of the standard we had become accustomed to, but this would only get us to Arica. At the bus terminal we were deluged with offers from  taxi drivers to go to Tacna and beyond. The trust between Chile and Peru could be seen by looking around the town with its large military bases. 

We braved finding a colectivo (a shared Taxi) and made our way to Tacna, a contrast in technique occurred, the Chile officials had bare offices with a computer that they scanned the passports while Peru had a huge shiny building but the passports were entered manually and we suspect the metal detectors and xray machines were just for show (ellen walking though the metal detector with her backpack on containing scissors, cables, laptop - didn’t trigger a beep – although she was asked to put the bag through the xray machine, nor was our organic food noted on the xray machine.)

We spent the night in Tacna where we were awoken by something that sounded distinctly like a bomb going off.  A short while later the sirens that you associate with air raids started.  Followed by the sound of army marching songs.  “Has there been an invasion… Should we hide in the hotel?” but no much later in the day we found our that a gas plant exploded.  The departures terminal of Tacna we discovered where the people hoping to become auctioneers go.  The rapid loud, and astonishingly clear call of “Arequipa” by those trying to attract customers was incessant.  After a very uneventful (but much getting out of passports) bus trip we have arrived in Arequipa.

Here we did a most unusual thing for us.  Not feeling like traipsing around the second biggest city in Peru at 8pm with all our gear we went to the tourist information bureau and picked one of the three hotels they had on offer and got them to organise a taxi for us (the taxi paid on commission rather than by us).  This turned out to be an excellent move.  The hostel was one of the nicest hostels we’ve stayed in.  It was an old colonial house and our room had 14 foot ceilings covered in incredibly ornate moulding.  There were even some very nice touches, like the speakers for an MP3 player with the sign “Because music is important in life please attach your MP3 player or iPod.”  The only downside was that they had no free matrimonial rooms so we didn’t really want to stay there for more than one night.   So this morning we went for a walk and found another place to stay, not quite so nice but still a big step up from our Chilean accommodation, or that in Tacna.  

 

Finally, a beach!

We have been longing to get to a  beach nearly since Christmas, so Iquique seemed like the perfect place to hang out, relax and spend some time listening to the waves crash on the sand.  The hostel here is very different to others we’ve stayed at in South America.  For one thing it’s full of Aussies!! This is a place for surf, so no real surprise there.  It’s a social place and the tiny kitchen is almost always full as people cook most meals.   Everyone hangs out at the hostel in the evenings, reading, watching TV and chatting.  One such evening on our second night we suddenly felt something… Jason thought a train was speeding by, I thought the wind was picking up… and then half a second after that we realised that no, this is an earthquake.  So we sat there whilst for 30 seconds the entire building shook, afterwhich everyone started making those inane comments when you’ve just experiencing something new and slightly scary.  “Did you feel that?”  “Was that an earthquake” “Cool!”.

 

One of the other big things to do here is to paraglide.  The guidebook mentions 3 day courses from $140, which sounds like a lot of fun.  However, when we started trying to find one of these courses we turned up nothing.  That is, nothing that short.  The shortest course we found was for 10 days, which is a bit long as we have a deadline for getting to Lima, not to mention an awful lot more expensive.  So instead of learning how to jump by ourselves, we will be strapped to the front of someone else as we take to the skies this afternoon.