Peru - Actual Day 6, travel to Chivay!

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¡Hola! I am writing this in an internet cafe in Puno, the alt-gr key is broken, so I cannot use apostrophes at all. Or the "at" key. Grrr.

I last left you waiting to go for dinner in Arequipa. We went to a really nice restaurant, which we were all very impressed with. I think the fixed menu was S/.27 and it was totally worth it. I had the Alpaca Carapaccio to start, followed by the stuffed chicken and steamed vegetables, with chocolate pancakes with ice cream for dessert. It was all fantastic, but the alpaca stood out as the best dish of the evening. Sometime during the evening we all decided that we could have spend another day in Arequipa, the city had grown on us over the course of the day there. We got back to the hotel around 9:30pm, I picked up my laundry (something like 15 sols), and we all pretty much collapsed into our rooms.

I woke up the next morning to the sound of roosters crowing again. I was not feeling so great, I had a pressure headache and my throat was a bit sore. I am quite glad I passed on the Pisco Sours the night before!
We had a 7:30am breakfast for an 8am departure for Chivay. For breakfast, I had mixed jugo.. ah.. I mean juice... that was a combination of quinoa (a local grain) and apple juice. I also had my first taste of local queso (cheese) which was delightful. We hopped on our private bus (a 20 seater) with George driving and Erica as our local guide). We headed out, stopping first in town for some coca sweets, leaves, and cookies, water and lemon candies. Loaded up, we headed out to Chivay, a small town in the Colca Valley. We went waaayyyy up, stopping at the highest point for coca tea and photos. If you have never been at these altitudes before, let me tell you, the coca everything is a great idea. Erica gave us all a fragrant oil to inhale and rub on our foreheads, and most of us had a coca tea. I had a coca tea in the morning and it seemed to help, but I was dying for another one when we hit 4900m. The air up there is so thin that you get out of breath getting off the bus and walking to the side of the road. One of our group had it worse than the rest, she stayed on the bus to have a head massage, and put her feet up. She got better pretty quickly, but I think we were all glad to have a local guide around to help out.

We took off again pretty quickly, descending rapidly down to the 3600m of Chivay. I got a moderately bad pressure headache on the way down, and it took me about 3 hours to get myself sorted out once we had arrived. We first stopped for lunch in Chivay before heading to the hotel.

Our hotel was actually about 15 mins outside of Chivay in the valley, and it was spectacular. We unloaded our gear and had about 2 hours to relax before Erica took us on a hike up the side of the valley. I was unsure about whether I was going to go when we first arrived, but I was feeling much better by the time we were to head out. The walk took about an hour in each direction, I ended up close to the back of the pack, partly because one of our group was having difficulty keeping up the pace, and partly because I was having difficulty keeping up the pace. We stopped frequently, drank plenty of water, and eventually made it to the first summit. We then looked up at the rest of our group, halfway up the next half of the trek, and grudgingly decided to try the last leg. We finally made it up, with 14 cameras and two photos each (Thanks erica!) we started heading back down. As before, I got a bad headache coming down, which sorted itself out that night.

The two of us arrived back at the hotel after dark, we had a bit of free time to clean up, then headed to the lounge for hot chocolate and drinks. I stuck to the hot chocolate, which again was a pretty good idea. We had a buffet dinner in the hotel, and sat around the fire for about 30mins after, then headed to bed exhausted at 9:30pm.

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