Hopping from Lima toward Lake Atitlán (part 3, Arequipa, Canyon de Colca, and Ruta Sillar)

It's been a decade or two since I last took an overnight bus, and quite frankly, I wouldn't mind if it were to be another decade or so before the next time. Even though the bus that PeruHop had chartered for this almost 11-hour journey was comfortable with reclining seats and even blankets, sitting in one spot for that long without ever getting off the bus tests one's stamina. The bus had an on-board toilet, yet with a window seat I was dependent on my seat neighbor's nature breaks to follow suit. For the first hour or so, Antonia (a bright microbiology student from Germany who lives in Denmark and who is taking an extended break between finishing her MA and starting her PhD) and I had a nice conversation going, but then it was dark and everybody on the bus started being quiet—and it was not even 7:00 p.m. yet!

We got to Arequipa around 5:30 a.m. What an ungodly time! Since the big bus would have never been able to squeeze through colonial Arequipa's narrow streets we were shuttled with smaller vans to our respective hotels. I had made arrangements with the Bon Repos beforehand and thus was able to check into my room, get under the shower, and catch a few hours of real sleep before having a nice breakfast on the hotel's terrace, overlooking Arequipa, a city that many say is Peru's most beautiful.

When I had started to flesh out my itinerary for this trip I had purposefully scheduled longer stays in the same city toward the end of the trip. In hindsight, I couldn't have planned it better: Even though Paracas and Huacachina were pleasant and (especially Paracas) would have deserved an extra night or two, Arequipa has so much more to offer, not only as a city but also in regard to excursions. So, five nights was appropriate, with another three nights on Lake Titicaca to come at the end of the trip.

For my arrival day I had penciled in a guided tour of the city. I had used the free walking tour concept for the first time in Buenos Aires and then again in Guatemala, and loved it: A local will take a small group of visitors on a walk through his or her city and tell you about history, culture, rumors, local issues, and all the other stuff that a guidebook will not touch. At the end of the tour you tip the guide an appropriate amount, and that's it. Just use Google on your next trip, and you will be surprised how many cities offer such tours. (The big bonus is that even though you still have to register ahead of time, your plans can stay super-flexible because no pre-payment is involved and you can cancel until the last minute, if needed.)

Our tour lasted for about three hours, and if the guide had been able to speak a more intelligible English it would have been extremely enjoyable. As was, it was difficult to discern what he was actually saying amid all of his theatrical antics, so on a scale of 1 to 10 he barely managed a 4. But it was clear that he was trying to tell us about issues with the local government, the dying of the city's historical center because of dilapidating houses, graft and corruption, and the dark side of the city's biggest tourist attraction, the Monasterio de Santa Catalina. Well, as if we didn't know that the Catholic Church is one of the best-run group of mafiosi out there! If anything, the tour gave me an idea of places that I would revisit in the days to come and gave me a first taste of the layout of the historical center.

I spent the rest of the day and the entire Wednesday drifting through the city of a million. Obviously, the UNESCO hasn't declared this place one of its World Heritage Sites for the industrial areas and favelas but rather for what all visitors come for: the two square kilometers of historical significance of the approximately 3,000 square kilometers that Arequipa encompasses. Let that one sink in.

Like most Spanish-colonial South American cities, Arequipa has a main square, with government buildings and a cathedral bordering it. From there, its streets are laid out in a rectangular pattern. Thanks to the many earthquakes that this area has experienced since it was established in the early 1500s the architecture runs the gamut from what is called baroque mestizo and colonial to French, English, and art deco. It's actually fairly easy to distinguish the styles once you know what you're looking for, and I give our tour guide credit for pointing out much more than I would have ever noticed myself. The early buildings are all one-story, and the building material is the local sillar. (More on that later.)

You'd think that buildings in the historical center would be extremely valuable. But look at them: Many of the one-story buildings are vacated, and so are the majority of the two-story buildings from a later period. The bottom floor may have a restaurant, a tattoo shop, a cell-phone place, a farmacia, or any other low-rent business, but the rest is empty. Not just one building, not just a dozen, hundreds. As our tour guide—in a rather indignant way—tried to communicate, it's a cancer in this city that is about to kill it. And the cause of the cancer, according to him, is the local government that levies exorbitant taxes for everything that local authorities can think of. As a result, nobody wants to touch the buildings (which already, in their dilapidated state, command princely sums in the millions). Ground-level retail locales are one thing, but solid neighborhoods are another.

When I talked to the Canadian owner/operator of brewpub Nowhere and broached this topic, he initially may not have understood me clearly. He's been married to a Peruvian woman and has been down here for about 15 years and he totally seemed to be unaware of the large number of abandoned properties, but upon questioning he conceded that dealing with paperwork and the local authorities is a nightmare, and that he wouldn't be able to have his business without being married to a national. 

It all looks pretty and authentic until you look closer, but isn't that the way it works everywhere? Corruption, graft, and nepotism are rampant in Latin America, and that's why people go out into the streets and demonstrate, and Peru has had its recent share. Our system, like it or not, is rigged as well, but not in such an ostensible way.

Arequipa has a bit of a special status in Peru as it was fiercely independent in the early days of the Republic, for a long time continuing to pledge allegiance to the Spanish king instead of the new government in Lima. As the second-largest city in the country it commands a strong economic status, and by sheer distance it is the capital of the Peruvian south. Commerce is thriving, and tourists come from not just abroad but from the north of Peru as well.

In my five days in Arequipa I sampled various local foods, among them rocoto, adobo, and cuy. (Pics above in reverse order.) While I had had the latter, guinea pig, on various occasions in Ecuador and Bolivia, I had never had it served butterfly-style. The meat was incredibly fresh-tasting and tender, and the chimichurri it was served with was out of this world. Carne adobada, in Mexico, has a much thicker sauce and definitely a more robust chile flavor than the more soupy stew-like adobo here. The chaser of anis-infused tea with a shotglass of anis on the side was a nice surprise—not that I really needed it after that jara de sangria, also with a touch of anis. And the rocoto is similar to a stuffed bell pepper, but the rocoto pepper packs much more heat than any of our bell peppers. The dish was served piping hot, with a bechamel-like topping that was whispy and complemented the potato as well as the rocoto itself. Great food! The only flop I experienced in regard to meals was an alpaca cutlet, which was tough and tasteless, to put it mildly. One can't always win.

Talking about alpacas: They're generally not seen as much of a food source but rather are raised for their wool. Arequipa houses a very interesting place to learn about camelids: El Mundo Alpaca Arequipa, part of the Mitchell Group's efforts to not only sell their amazing wool products but also to educate visitors about the role that alpacas, llamas, vicuñas, and—to a very small degree—guanacos (which live mostly in Chile and Argentina) play for Peru as export generators. At the center one can touch several types of alpacas and llamas, the two domesticated South American camelids; vicuñas and guanacos live only in the wild, and capturing them and shearing them is something that has been practiced by the Andean highland population for centuries. Vicuña hair is the finest in the world, beating out even cashmere and other high-dollar products. A women's vicuña cape on display in a glass case carried a price-tag of around $9,000. And no, none of these wools are impervious to marauding moths!

Sorting alpaca wool by quality and color is best left to the locals

Arequipa has a fairly robust microbrewery scene. I added another six establishments to my list. None of them knocked off my socks, but the beer at both Nowhere and Chelawasi was very nice. My afternoon routine consisted of returning to the hotel from whatever sightseeing or excursion I had completed, grab my laptop, and venture out for a brewery or taproom to work on the blog. On three occasions I was able to use the rooftop terrace, giving me a nice office view. Believe me, it's not easy to keep up with the blog when one sees so much!

As far as sightseeing in Arequipa is concerned, there are two monasteries and several museums that are definite must-dos. The larger and more important of the two monasteries open to visits is the Monasterio de Santa Catalina, and it still is home to several Dominican nuns, albeit no longer in the historical buildings, which were opened to the public in the 1970s. (My hotel was located just across the street from this monastery, and from the breakfast terrace I had a wonderful view of the compound, which included seeing the nuns' bloomers on the clothes line, not as much of a turn-on as one might think.)

I spent almost three hours wandering through this city in a city, which covers several city blocks, has its own streets, and is separated from the outside world by high wall. The monastery was founded in 1579, and it never housed more than about 60 nuns (it started out with barely half a dozen). Somehow I had expected nothing but stark cells, but a better description would be that this monastery was similar to a gated community of two-room condos, with attached kitchen and some with a small chapel. Depending on the financial situation of the nuns, their cells had nice carpets and cushions, sofas to receive high-ranking visitors, and other comforts that I hadn't expected. Of course, there was still the life of a nun (prayer, abstinence, self-flagellation, and all the other good stuff), but it just seemed more like a severely secluded life than pure mental anguish and physical hell. And, it seems, quite a number of women entered the convent after getting knocked up—out of wedlock—to spend a few years out-of-sight, out-of-mind, and then return to a new secular life.

The other monastery that I visited, Monasterio y Museo de la Recoleta, is much smaller and less known. I happened across it by chance, and I am glad I did. This Franciscan monastery no longer houses monks, and it is obvious that the museum aspect has taken on an important role. One sees less evidence of daily life, but that doesn't take away from its ambience. The library is stunning: manuscripts dating back to the 15th century, ancient maps, just the smell of all those old books! Wow! The museum part didn't disappoint, either, with a collection of items ranging from stamps to stuffed animals of the Amazon, from TVs and telephones from the '50s to children's toys, from gold chalices to—no kidding!—a collection of Hot Wheels. It was just an extremely eclectic mix of stuff. The highlight, though, was climbing up the belltower and being oh-so-tempted to ring those huge bells!

No visit to Arequipa would be complete without seeing La Momia Juanita, the frozen mummy that was found in 1995 during an archeological expedition to the top of one of the nearby volcanoes, Volcán Ampato, one of the highest in the region at 6,200 meters—a good spot if you want to freeze a corpse. Through some vagaries of nature, the poor girl (about 12 to 15 years old, and quite likely a virgin—they're always virgins!) had been chosen as a sacrificial lamb by the Incas during a time of bad tidings. Apparently that was the way things were done, as other mummies were found in the general area, all of them with cranial injuries so that the sacrifice explanation actually sounds fairly plausible. The Museo Santuarios Andinos is very small and is dedicated almost entirely to Juanita's story. Finding a well-preserved corpse frozen means that thanks to modern technology, researchers were able to find out that she had been sedated with chicha (the original South American craft beer!) before being knocked hard over the head; with DNA testing, archeologists also were able to determine that she came from the Puno area on Lake Titicaca. Well, I better watch out since that's where I'll head next.

Oops, wrong mummy—Juanita is kept frozen in a case

I had to find a spot for these guys ...

My sightseeing wasn't limited just to the city. I had booked two excursions ahead of time, nicely spaced out as to alternate city days with excursions. The first one was a full-day excursion to Canyon de Colca, about a 100-mile drive northwest of Arequipa and necessitating a 3:30 a.m. departure. I swear, my sleep patterns down here have been pretty sucky. Even at that ungodly time truck traffic was already heavy, and since we had to climb over a pass at 4,900 meters (or a bit more than 16,000 feet) our progress was at times maddeningly slow, creeping along at 10 mph. In hindsight, it was a lot of bus time with only about three-and-a-half hours, maybe four, on the ground, half of which was taken up with breakfast, lunch, and wasted time at some overcrowded hot springs (you could also zip-line, four-wheel, or kayak in a pool-sized stretch of the local river—I chose to sit in the shade with a beer and watch the hordes of mainly local tourists wallow in the pools).

But the canyon was rather spectacular. I don't know how exactly the depth of a canyon is being measured, but Colca Canyon is the second deepest canyon in the world; the Chinese own the world record, and that's doubtful to change anytime soon. If you've been to our venerable Grand Canyon, well, Colca is twice as deep. That brings me back to "how does one measure the depth of a canyon": Whenever I've been at the Grand Canyon, I have been awed by standing at some vista point on the South Rim and looking down for what seem to be miles and miles of slopes. If you look at my pics, there was none of that feeling at Colca—maybe it was because we were at mid-mountain?

We live by numbers, and Colca is #2 on the depth list. So, there you go. And it is also seen as the best spot to observe condors in the wild in South America, with the exception of a few almost impossible-to-reach places. In the bus, somebody said he had seen eleven condors at the same time. Well, it turns out that the local association in charge of the nature preserve makes sure that the condors stick around, because without them only half the tourists would show up, or fewer. So they chum the condors, throwing goodies for these mega-vultures over the cliffs in the morning and thus ensuring that those hundreds, if not thousands of daily tourists get their condor fix. Let's not be too negative here: Thanks to conservation efforts and sanctuaries such as this, Andean condors (wingspan of up to three meters or a little more than 10 feet) have returned from the brink of extinction. 

Colca Sours are made with the fruit of a local cactus instead of lemons

On the way back we stopped several times for photo opportunities of large herds of alpacas. Somehow I found that more impressive than the condors. This landscape—barren, cold, unforgiving, bordering on hostile—somehow is home to a few thousand people who have domesticated these fascinating animals, caring for their herds (which also include a few sheep and llamas, to protect them better from foxes) and eking out a living. Do the kids go to school? If so, where? Do they pay taxes? Do they have cell phones? How do they recharge them? Where is the next doctor? How do they perceive us? 

Oh well, musings of a gringo while trying to keep a clear head at 4,912 meters, looking at all the volcanoes and also having to use the restroom, badly. I don't think I want to live up here, regardless of how impressive the landscape may be. We're used to our own world, and this one is alien to me.

My second excursion from Arequipa was a half-day trip to the quarries where the sillar blocks were cut to be used in the construction of all the colonial buildings. (To this day, sillar is being used as a building material.) Sillar is a type of a pyroclastic flow, also called tuff, and it is relatively easy to cut and work with. Two types of sillar can be found here, one in glistening white and the other one with a slight pinkish tint. As the chemical composition of the white variety makes it somewhat softer it was used for construction, and it lies at the root of Arequipa's being known as La Ciudad Blanca. 

I was the only gringo on this tour, and since it was clear that I speak a smidgen of Spanish the cute tour guide decided to not practice her English. So, here we went, chicos y chicas, which is the equivalent to our use of y'all or guys. Our tour included a brief stop to take a pic of three of Arequipa's volcanoes (one is Cachani, the other one is Pichu Pichu, and the badass that keeps wreaking havoc is Misti). 

From there we drove to the Ruta de Sillar and first visited the culebrillas, something that we would call badlands. Our group, with all the misbehaving kids that drove our guide nuts, took a kilometer-long walk through some of the small canyons that are reminiscent of what you'd see in Utah. Along the way we saw a few petroglyphs as well. A short while after our hike, we arrived at one of the actual quarries, and I have to say, the sheer walls were quite impressive. Sillar blocks continue to be used for building projects, and additionally the canteros (stonemasons) show off their skills by creating immense statues and bas reliefs that at times border on kitsch. I just loved Santa and the reindeer! We walked around for a while and then headed back to the White City.

And that pretty much concluded my tourist activities in Arequipa. I am glad that I had dedicated five nights in the city as I never got bored. During my time I learned a lot about the history and culture of not only Arequipa but Peru as well, way more than I can even try to convey in this already long blog post. If you plan a trip to Peru, I would definitely allot several days to this bustling city, before the next earthquake destructs it once again.

Jürgen