Arequipa and Colca Canyon, Peru

The next stop on the Gringo Trail is the so-called "White City" of Arequipa. It is not named, as some may suspect, for its veneration of the coca leaf, but for the sillar,or white volcanic rock which was used extensively in the building of the city. The city founders did not have to go too far to find this sillar, since the city lays in the shadow of three volcanoes, El Misti, Chachani and Pichu Pichu. (Interesting note: the Quechua or indigenous language does have a plural form, so if you wanted to, say, talk about more than one peak, or "Pichu", you would just say the word twice, thus "Pichu Pichu".) The presence of this trio quietly provides two things: constant danger of volcanic eruptions and really great views from virtually everywhere in the city. Fortunately, we only experienced the latter. I also got to visit the city's two main tourist attractions: the Santa Catalina convent, which is a city in of itself and Juanita, the ice princess. Santa Catalina was the convent during the colonial times. If you happened to be the second child in a wealthy family and you happened to be a girl, like it or not, you were heading for the convent. You just didn't have to worry about all that vow of poverty business. In Santa Catalina you were free to decorate your "cell" in all the finery your family could provide and if you wanted to decorate the adjoining rooms for the servants and/or slaves you brought along, that was fine, too. One curious observation was that all the master bedrooms had an arched niche where the good Sisters' beds would be placed. This was the soundest point, architecturally speaking, in the event of an earthquake. The servants/ slaves, however, had to have a bit more faith in the Lord, since they usually got a simple mattress on the floor, with no niche anywhere in the vicintity. There are tales, that in its day, Santa Catalina hosted some pretty raucous parties behind it cloistered walls and it is not to so difficult to imagine this mini-city with its labyrinth of colorful streets and alleyways (all of which are named after Spanish towns) coming alive after dark. Sadly for the sisters, the party ended in 1871, when a strict head nun moved into town and made them get rid of their riches, as well as their servants/ slaves. Today, there are still some nuns that live in an area of the convent which is off limits to tourists, but they seem to have continued to live in this less interesting, more low-key manner. The other must-see, Juanita, is a 500 year-old mummy that was discovered on the snowy peaks of Mt. Ampato. Having remained in a frozen condition for all this time has left Juanita amazingly well-preserved. A visit to the Museum of the Catholic University and an hour's worth of videos and explanations about how she was sacrificed by the Incas to appease the mountain deities, or in the alternative, married to the mountain deity, culminates in the opportunity to peek into a glass freezer where Juanita sits today.

Another item on the Arequipa checklist is an overnight visit to nearby Colca Canyon. Colca, is at this moment, the deepest canyon in the world. I say 'at this moment' because it seems to regularly trade that title back and forth with Cotahuasi Canyon, also located in Peru. It is most likely a question of which canyon floor is eroding quicker at a given time, but I prefer to imagine the respective city's PR person sneaking down in the middle of the night with a pail and shovel trying to reclaim/ maintain the title. The drive through the canyon is replete with scenic vistas, llama and alpaca spotting, hot springs and of course, Inca burial sites, but the stars of the show are unquestionably the Andean condors. These massive vultures were considered sacred to the Incas, who even erected a temple at Machu Pichu in their honor, and still hold the fascination of the Peruvian people today. Two ultra-cool Peruvian girls that had joined our tour, Carmen and Janeth, had planned their entire vacation specifically for the purpose of seeing condors flying free (and not in zoos, as they had in their home city of Lima). The condors do not always make an appearance at the Cruz del Condor, the famous look-out point where one is most likely to see them soaring on the thermals in the mornings so after 20 or so condor-free minutes at this spot , and some inadvertant picture-taking by some in the crowd of what to me looked like a pigeon, I began to worry for our new friends. A man with an official-looking badge had clued them in on what he predicted would be the best spot to see the condors, so we sat where told and waited patiently. Finally, one impressive looking big black scavenger bird took a pass directly over us, and was quickly followed by at least 8 or 9 of his friends. The badge was right on the money, those condors gave us one hell of a show over the course of the next thirty minutes, two of then going so far as to perch themselves on a rock that was just a few feet away from us. I didn't even know in which direction to point my camera anymore (Shawn on the other hand had just discovered the multi-burst feature on his new camera and was shooting away machine-gun style at anything with feathers). In the end, we all left there giddy albeit with thoroughly drained camera batteries (and in my case, an exhuasted memory card). We then returned to village of Chivay, where we had spent the prior night, for lunch and wouldn't you guess it....we were just in time for a parade....