Arequipa

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In Arequipa we saw Juanita the Ice PRincess, from 1490AD she is a 14 year old Incan mummy sacrificed at the top of the Ampato volcano near Arequipa. She is amazingly well preserved you can still see her skin, hair, teeth and some of the cloth that she is wrapped in looks like new.

I am feeling quite at home at the hostel in Arequipa, the brothers that own it (Victor and Hugo-my guide in Colca) have been really kind to me.
I got a free, very decadent breakfast at a restaurant down the road which Victor's friend owns. It was a photoshoot breakfast so I had to allow my photo to be taken as part of propaganda for the new restaurant.
For second course I tried Cuy. it's tasty, but doesn't have a lot of meat on it, it does come bellyflopped onto the plate head and paws and all and it's a bit hard trying to pry it off when a) you know you're being photographed and b) you're trying to appear that you are listening to the rambling monologue of your breakfast modelling partner (this swiss guy called marcelo).

Following breakfast I was lucky enough to be shown around the city by Alain, Victor's nephew who is a very friendly, smiley kid, and gave me a friendship band and a pair of earrings he made (and not so subtly suggested that I wouldn't need my head torch in Bolivia and CHile and that coincidentally he had lost his only recently...!).

together we went to the lookout point to see El Misti the Volcano, and then to have lunch in the countryside on the outskirts of Arequipa at an old molindo or wheat mill. We had a delicious lunch accompanied by no less than 7 drooling dogs who had smelled the chichharone (pork) and alain was quite worried that i'd be disturbed by them and kept trying to shoo them away but i told him it was no problem, it actually made me a bit homesick. we spoke in spanish the whole day, even though he has done six months of english and me only one week of spanish.

oh, and another visit to a Peruvian Hospital for my tum.

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