Day 42 - Arequipa, Peru (29 April 2012)

Day 42 – Arequipa, Peru (29 April 2012)

When I awake we are almost in Arequipa.  I can see the lights from the city.  This city has a million people living in it.  It is a very wide spread city, so it feels like we are driving through it for ages.  When we arrive, we take a taxi to a hostel called Le Foyer.  We get a room for 50 soles a night (25).  As it is 7am in the morning, we use the morning just to chill out and catch up on some sleep.  We then get up about mid morning and we head into town.  It is a very nice city centre.  There is a large plaza with a cathedral.  The noticeable thing about Arequipa is that all the buildings are white.  They are all made of sillar which is the stone from the neighbouring Volcano’s.  Also, this city is very low level.  There are no high rises here.  It makes the city look a lot smaller than it actually is.  We walk around the city and we book ourselves into the Colca Canyon Tour for the next day. This costs us 45 soles each (22.5) plus we have to pay for our park entrance fees of 70 soles each (NZ 35). What a rip off, especially when Peruvians only pay 20 soles each for park entrance fees. We then have an early lunch since we are starving!  We go to a restaurant which is upstairs overlooking the plaza.  There are some great views over the Plaza de Armes (city centre) at this place.  We end up getting the set menu for lunch which is 15 soles each (7.50).  We get a soup, a main and a drink.  I get the vegetable soup, a main of lamb saltado which is a Peruvian dish and homemade lemonade, which is fantastic.  Ann decided to try the Pisco Sour for her drink.  The Pisco Sour is the Peruvian national alcoholic drink.  The saltado’s are delicious!  So good in fact that I see a pamphlet for a Peruvian cooking class that I want to do (I inquired about this class but it was only Ann and I that put our names down for the class so it didn’t go ahead, doesn’t matter because google will solve everything).  After lunch we go to the Museu Sanctuarios Andinos for 20 soles each (10).  This museum is run by the local university and is devoted to the discovery of ‘Juanita’.  Juanita is a 13 year old girl who was found up the top of a volcano in 1995.  Juanita has been dead for over 550 years, but as she was killed up the top of a volcano, her body, organs and muscles are still fully in tacked.  In ancient Peruvian times, they use to believe in sacrificing to the gods.  During the La Nina season when there were droughts, the Peruvian’s thought that the gods were communicating that they are mad with them.  Therefore, to appease the gods, they would send a sacrifice.  They would choose the most important child and walk them up to the top of the Volcano.  This would take about three months.   Then once at the top, they would get the children to drink highly intoxicating alcohol and they would then give them a big blow to the head to kill them.  They would then burry them in the Volcano.  They didn’t bury Juanita very well, as she slid 80 metres down the volcano.  This is why her body is so well preserved.  The earth of the volcano is very hot, so the other children that have been later found up there are burnt and in very poor condition.  So in this museum we got to see the clothes and shoes that she was wearing.  The blood stains are still there from the blow to the head.  Then we got to see Juanita ourselves.  She is kept at -27 degrees and 99% humidity to ensure she does not deteriorate.  It was so fascinating.  She looks like a real human being.  No photos were allowed to be taken in this museum.
After the museum we decide to go to the Monasterio Santa Catalina which is a 450 year old convent.  I was not that keen to check this out but I went along for a look anyway.  This costs us 35 soles (17.50).  This convent was pretty big.  We are given a map so we can navigate our way around it.  This convent was used all the way up to the 1970s.  There is now a new convent in the same block that the nuns use.  The old convent is now purely a museum.  Here we saw the ‘cells’ that the nuns lived in, the rooms that were used for them to communicate to the outside world.  The communal bath that the used, the main kitchen, the temples, the cemetery and the church.  When this convent was set up, a lot of the nuns were used to living a wealthy live, so when they moved into the convent, they were not keen to give this up.  Therefore, the convent has streets inside it so it feels like a town.  Also the majority of the cells are very large and come with their own kitchen and oven and outdoor area.   It takes us a good couple of hours to get around this whole place! 
After this it is time for dinner.  We go to a Turkish place across the road from our hostel as we have heard that Arequipa is not a very safe place at night time.  We then go back to the hostel and go to bed since we are being picked up at 3am the following morning for our Colca Canyon tour. What a ridiculous time right?