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Published: October 15th 2016
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From Puno we took a less glamorous local bus to Arequipa, just over 6 hours away. Just 4 of us left now - the 3 girls I met on the plane from Lima to Cusco.
Arequipa is the second largest city in Peru after Lima. We hadn't had lunch so ended up in an English pub a few doors from the hotel. 4pm lunch of Andean pie (kind of like quinoa lasagne) which was great, along with 6 or 7 rounds of drinks to commiserate the shrinking of our group. Colin, our South African waiter let us take over the music and we had a grand old time.
Later we did our city orientation walk and had a late pizza dinner. Italian food is huge in Peru.
Early start for Chivay and Coporaque, our stopover near the Colca Canyon, famous for its condors. We were less than enthusiastic after the late night and copious drinks, but our guide Mili was more than enthusiastic and did not let us sleep! We learned about the local volcanoes amongst other things on our drive. We saw a lot of vicunyas, a relative of llamas and alpacas.
We crossed the mountains
and hit 4910m altitude, which was icy cold and takes your breath away. That didn't stop the locals having a market at the summit though, so i bought my second alpaca jumper.
Back down the mountain to Chivay where we tried some street food and checked out the local food markets. Onto our hotel in Coporaque, no tv or wifi! We all panicked but ended up having a lovely afternoon meandering the countryside, visiting the hot springs (220 steps each way) and watching the villagers perform an impromptu drunken parade.
Early morning start to head to the Colca Canyon for condor spotting. Again we tried to sleep but Mili wouldn't have it. We visited a few villages on the way and saw the locals performing dances and attending Sunday church services.
We kept going and hit the gravel road to the canyon. Not much out this way, a few farms but mostly just rugged, stunning scenery. Our driver freaked us out turning the bus lights off in a 300m tunnel!
The condor crossing gets busy but our guide had timed it well, we beat a lot of the groups and saw 5 or 6 condors. They
are around 1m tall with a wingspan of 3m so look pretty impressive. They are fast though so no good pics.
On the way back to Arequipa we stopped in Maca where I cuddled a 3 month old alpaca. Mili finally let us sleep tge rest of the 4 hour drive back to Arequipa.
In Arequipa we rested then set out to see the main square at night. The next morning I had a massage at the hotel then joined the others in town. Had a debacle of a lunch where every order was wrong and they gave chicken to a vegetarian, checked out the frozen corpse of Juanita the mummy, then we wandered all afternoon and saw the sunset. Later that night we boarded our overnight bus to Nazca.
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