Arequipa was once a very long drive over a bumpy road from Lima. By 2010, and presumably still today, you could ride a modern road on a comfortable overnight bus with reclining seats, a hot meal served by the cabin crew, movies to watch and breakfast with coffee the next morning. Some might sneer at this level of comfort but we’ve done enough really tough bus rides in our time that we were happy to kick back and enjoy the service.
High up from the dry and sandy desert coast, Arequipa is visually dramatic. Surrounded by conical volcanos and bathed in lovely sunlight streaming from a clear blue sky, it was a welcome change from grey and gritty Lima.
This was good, because we ended up staying a long time…
I am almost never sick. I can count on one hand the number of times in the last decade that I have been out of action for more than 24 hours. But in Arequipa, I contracted an ugly flu that laid me out for about six days. It hit me after we’d already been there four days, and I spent most of my time lying in bed, sleeping and guzzling water, trying to build my strength for a trek into the Colca Canyon.
When I wasn’t sick, though, we explored this attractive town. A lot of the buildings are made from volcanic silar stone, which can also be carved into neat little statues.
But Arequipa’s most famous for three things: Juanita, the 12 year old sacrifice victim mummified by the cold weather atop the volcano where she died; the vast and ancient convent which opened its doors in 1973 for the first time in 300 years; and as an easy base to summit several 5,500+ metre mountains. Clearly the latter was out of the question for me, given I could hardly walk to the bathroom, but the other two, and more, we were able to visit.
 Lima |
 Huayna Potosi |
 Choquequirao |
The little museum of archeology where Juanita is kept was excellent. They ban photos, and ban you from taking cameras in – an effective way to ensure flash doesn’t degrade the artifacts (which are almost all organic – the mummy herself and her clothing). A guide explained all the artifacts – her clothes, pottery shards, sacrificial gifts – while a National Geographic video gave details of the expedition that discovered her. The suspense built as you moved through the museum, until finally you reached the small room where Juanita lies, frozen inside a triple-glazed box. Peering through the dark and the frost, you could clearly see her face, with its blunt-force trauma wound on the right forehead, her eyes, her dry skin and her dark hair. It was eerie and fascinating – literally staring eye-to-eye with a person who died 500 years ago.
Arequipa is a pleasant city, full of great restaurants. At Chicha, founded by one of Peru’s best chefs, we ate (three times!) lots of great food. Huge servings, restrained service, and delicious, delectable food. My alpaca dish – big enough for two – was easily the most perfectly-prepared meat I’d eaten in a long, long time. Their traditional pork soup was rich beyond description. At another Arequipa institution, Sol de Mayo, I tried guinea pig, which tasted nothing like chicken. Gruesome to look at, it was nonetheless easy to see why it’s a speciality, with its smooth, totally-non-chicken-like flavour and tender consistency. Did I mention it tastes nothing like chicken?
The famous convent in Arequipa was a closed shop for about three centuries. Only in the 1970s did it finally open its doors to the public. A few nuns still live there today in a private area. You can visit and see the (relatively) austere conditions they lived in. They also had a gruesome collection of cilices (whips for self-flagellation) and barbed wire underpants, as well as some fairly graphic images of Jesus on the cross.
The Colca Canyon
Finally recovered from the flu, and desperate to get out of the hotel room, I declared myself fit enough for a hike down into the Colca Canyon. The guidebooks and tour companies tout this as grander than the Grand Canyon: “if you like the Grand Canyon, you’ll love Colca” was a typical refrain.
We headed out of town on an afternoon bus up to the small village of Cabanaconde. Many people go with a tour company but there is actually no need, because arrangements are easy and the canyon only really has two directions you can walk – up and down.
It’s beautiful, but it’s a stretch to say it’s grander than the Grand Canyon. For starters, in most places it just looks like a really deep valley, rather than a canyon as you’d imagine it after having seen the Grand Canyon.
After staying in the sleepy little village, we headed off in the morning along the canyon/valley ridge before striking down for a long descent.
There were two main stretches of switchbacks – dusty, rocky, and fairly steep. After several hours we reached the bottom of the valley, where a river flowed lazily and the path crossed it with a small pedestrian bridge. On the other side, we struck out west, into the falling sun, past enormous cactus plants and along a very dry, scrubby, dusty hillside.
We slept that night in a lovely little lodge right by the river. Tiny bamboo cabins held comfortable beds, and the owners, Claudio and Yola, cooked us up a delicious dinner of freshly caught fish.
Between arriving and having dinner, we watched the sun set from the thermally heated pool Claudio had built by the river bank. It was beautiful and very relaxing on our tired limbs.
And when Claudio shut of the electricity to preserve his solar-charged batteries, we saw the deepest, darkest, richest night sky of our lives – even more impressive than the dark skies of Utah.
The next day, it was a long, hard, long slog back out of the valley. Having been bedridden with the flu only two days before, we agreed I wasn’t up to a longer route via another village. It was a struggle for me, to be honest, despite the climb being not much harder than what we’d done at the Grand Canyon in April that year (2010). Mercifully, it was not as hard as the trek into Choquequirao we would do some weeks later. By the time we got to the top, I was running on reserves. But I made it. Yon helped me by counting off the switchbacks in a maniacal voice like that vampire off Sesame Street.
After another night in Cabanaconde, we were humming back downhill towards Arequipa, through a lovely sun-drenched landscape of grazing alpacas and dry terraced hills, and in close quarters with villagers from the towns along the canyon.
That night, we watched a parade in town. Then, finally, we left Arequipa on an early morning bus, heading for the frontier town of Tacna. It appeared over the sandy desert as nothing more than a gash of human construction in the brown wasteland.
From there, we raced in a collectivo to the frontier with Chile. The Chilean guard noticed my Transformers t-shirt: “Megatron! Now that’s what I’m talking about! You got anything to declare?”
Welcome to Chile.
