Arequipa - Colca Valley (aka Fun with Cameloids) -- Part 1

On a whim we decided to get the f%@! outta Dodge (Cuzco) for a few days and headed to Arequipa, a city about 10 hours southwest of Cuzco and double the size of our temporary home. It just happened that our visit coincided with Day of Arequipa, a celebration commemorating the city’s founding that this year also included an International Festival. Due to the holiday, extra buses were running and we got seats on an extra janky one that had no working cooling/heating system, leaving us to swelter at first and to utterly freeze during the night. Ah, ha, that’s why all the Peruvians (the rest of the bus) had brought blankets. We arrived in Arequipa at 5:30 a.m. to find people just headed home after partying all night -- one cab driver was drunkenly weaving through the streets, opening the door of his Daewoo to spit (or vomit?) without coming to a stop. Our awfully chipper and talkative cab driver was eager to practice his English and point out the sights of his town on our ride from the bus station, which turned into more of a city tour since we didn’t have a hostel or hotel reservation and had to ask at more than half a dozen places before finding a hotel that promised to have a room later.

Arequipa is know as the White City because of many buildings, including the main cathedral in the Plaza de Armas, are constructed from sillar, a white volcanic rock. Another reason for the name came from the coloring of the inhabitants after colonization by Spanish, when few indigenous people lived there. The feria (holiday) manifested itself in the form of a big corso (parade) that included everyone from representatives of all branches of the armed forces and police, corporate-sponsored floats housed on Mac trucks that belched confetti, and dancing delegations from many parts of the Spanish-speaking (we saw folkloric dancers from Mazatlan and Colombia to name just a couple). The parade occupied much of the town and made crossing the streets quite tricky if not downright impossible for good stretches of time, rendering us a part of the show as we walked alongside the festivities looking for an escape route where the masses (clutching big brown glass bottles of beer) weren’t crowded on the sidewalk in an eclectic mix of chairs.

While we were tempted to get some bottles and watch the parade -- the thoughts “if you can’t beat them, join them” definitely crossed our minds as we were fighting to cross the streets -- we only had a limited time in the city and wanted to see Monasterio de Santa Catalina. The nunnery has been in operation since the 1500s and is a photographer’s paradise, with brightly painted walls of periwinkle blue and ochre shade of orange, succulent plans, striking courtyards, and bare-bones nun quarters. The monastery is so big it’s practically a city within a city, with picturesque settings around every corner. We spent a good two hours exploring the grounds and then took a nap, which was much-needed given our torturous overnight bus ride. We thought we might sleep all night and not make it out on the town since we didn’t have any time of alarm, let alone clock (we have no phones and left our watches -- which we rarely ever use anyway -- in Cuzco).

The next day we were up early to start our tour of the Colca Valley along with 3 Italian couples, a German family, a Hungarian pair, and two other Americans. Our guide, Joanna, was a wealth of information and the first set of fun facts she shared with us were about cameloids in Peru -- llamas, alpacas, vicuñas (the only type of the species that are protected by the government), guanacos. They are actually native to the Rocky Mountains, where they lived before the Ice Age. We also learned how to tell llamas and alpacas apart -- alpacas are smaller, walk with their tails down and have a more rounded face while llamas are bigger, walk with tails up and have a more pointed face. Llamas can only carry up to 30 kilos, which is why you don’t see people riding them.

One of my favorite street activities is to walk up behind a llama or alpaca and give their coats a gentle push with a flat hand to test the sponginess of the fur, a habit I got from our friend Eduardo. You have to do it a bit clandestinely since the creatures are there with women and girls who dress in traditional garb and try to get tourists to pay them a sol (Peru’s currency is the nuevo sol, literally “new sun“) or two in return for taking a photo. It’s not good to encourage this practice since the animals shouldn’t be living below 4,000 meters (12,000 feet); at that altitude they eat more fibrous grasses that keep their teeth worn down, while under that elevation they eat softer grasses like alfalfa that allow their teeth to get bigger and eventually too big to eat, leading to death. But we did keep our promise to Flor, a little girl of about 9, who we met in San Blas on my birthday that we would find her and her alpaca, Oso, later since we didn’t have our cameras with us then. We saw her in the street the other day and got some cute photos of the very smart niña posing with her head cocked just so and her big-toothed beige critter.