Arequipa

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Finally a trouble free comfortable bus and we arrived in Arequipa on time at 6.30am. With the tight schedule that we had given ourselves you can be forgiven to think we were on a 2 week holiday. So with 3 days and 2 nights we had to squash in a 2 days tour of Colca Canyon before we were due to catch another overnight bus to Lima.

First stop was to visit a number of tour agencies to find out prices and schedules. Traditionally this is a 3 day tour as the canyon is a 6 hr bus trip from Arequipa, but we knew it could be done in 2. So with the persuasive power of numbers (2 of us) we managed to organise our preferred choice which meant leaving at midnight that night.

Next job was to find a hostal and as we walked out the door of the agency (Ecotours), the hostal across the road caught our eye with a roof terrace poking out over the street. As we would only need a room for half the night we went in set on making a hard bargain and the lovely hostal man, amused by our check out time, obliged.

We checked into our room and unpacked half our clothes which were dirty from the Inca Jungle Trek as well as most of our other clothes which were giving off a lovely damp smell after sitting in our bags since our last washing disaster 5 days ago. They all went straight to the laundry mat and we gave the poor a lady strict instructions and time frames. This left us with the rest of the day to explore Arequipa and to be honest we weren´t expecting much but to our surprise there was amazing colonial architecture on every corner. As you probably realise from our holiday so far, we aren´t the biggest museum goers but after reading about one of the museums here we were intrigued and headed off.

The Museo Santuarios Andinos was really a specialized museum with only the one exhibit which was the frozen and preserved remains of sacrificed Inca children. It only took an hour but was time very well spent. We started by watching a movie that explained some of the Inca beliefs and rituals.

The Inca civilization, although expanding to an empire, only lasted a short 100 years. Their demise came in the 17th century with the arrival of the Spanish and although we believed the Incas were a sophisticated society, we learnt they had not even discovered the wheel or have a written language which seems primitive compared to the much earlier empires of Egypt and Rome. The ritualistic killings of the children were performed to appease the gods and in total 18 children between the ages of 8 and 14 have been found high in the mountains of Peru and Argentina. "Specially chosen" children were laiden with gifts and taken to amazing altitudes (up to 6500m) on volcano tops, where they were intoxicated and given a deadly blow to the back of the head. They were then buried with their offerings. Thanks to the altitude and freezing conditions, these bodies and artifacts remained preserved for over 500 years. Many of the children were uncovered in the 90´s only due to melting of the snow caused by the ash from one of the neighbouring volcanoes. Preserved are clothing, jewellery, pottery and ornaments given to the gods but what was an amazing sight was seeing a small girl in near perfect condition still with the lasting expression on her face from her bizarre last moments.

With a lovely warm sunny evening we purchased some drinks and snacks and relaxed on the roof terrace of our hostal before retreating to bed at an early 7pm.

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