Arequipa and Colca Canyon

Arequipa is Peru´s scond largest city and it shows. My friend and I took the midnight express bus from Cusco at 8:30 (which actually left on schedule) and arrived into Arequipa at the crack of dawn, 6am. At this time of day, the streets were completely empty.

We checked into a hostel and had some breakfast.  We went back to the streets at around 8:30 and it was bumper to bumper with cars, mainly taxis, sometimes blanketing entire city blocks. Car traffic was definitely more intense than Cusco and on par with Lima. At intersections, there are standoffs between opposing cars and basically whoever moves first has the right of way. As a pedestrian, cars won´t stop for you unless you make the move to cross the street. Flinching causes drivers to hesitate, then hit the gas when they see me coming to a stop. If they are slow bout it, it makes me think they are actually stopping for me, then I almost get T-boned when I try to cross.  I need to remember my Frogger skills while I was in Thailand.

Aside from traffic, another big difference about Arequipa is the architecture is modern compared to Cusco. Whereas Cusco is embracing their history with building designs, Arequipa has a Spanish/European influence:

The tourist industry is not as prevelent in Arequipa- the biggest attraction in the city is the Santa Catalina Monastery, a monestary for nuns. It was created by a rich widow who took in women from upper-class Spain to be nuns and allowed them to have servants and slaves. After a few centuries of this, the pope sent someone down to clean house and restore order to the convent. The servants and slaves were released, though some stayed to become nuns. About 50 years ago, the Peruvian government ordered them to open up to the public to become a tourist attraction to help pay for repairs and upgrades after a couple earthquakes in the 1960s.

Up until this point, I have not bothered with visiting any of the churches in Peru. It´s just not my thing... maybe it´s a Demian Thorn-in-church feeling. But there really isn´t much else that is for tourists except eat and drink and visit the Colca Canyon (more on this later). I will admit, though, that visiting the convent was a good move. The architectural design is really beautiful and I really like the use of colors. We were able to walk through almost all of the two-block long compound.

I really like the ceiling design

bacon flames?

Did they have elfs in this monestary?

in the garden, I saw an image of Jesus! 

The most interesting thing for me was to go through the living quarters and see the cooking areas.

el metate (one of many found here)

there is no hole in the bottom of the cone- condensation along the sides of the cone gather at the point and eventually drips... or maybe the water seems through the stone and drips at the point?

luxury: a two oven kitchen

notice the paddle-like instrument on the left.  I suspect that fish is placed inside and then sits atop the metal sheet with a hole in it that goes over the coals

two entry points for this oven

the nuns are raising ginea pigs

Food

We ate at Chicha another restaurant from chef Gaston Acurio (on teevee, I randomly caught a ceremony for the 50 best restaurants in the world and this chef´s restaurant in Lima, which I went to, was  #35). Good place, here are some photos:

this was a trio of ceviche- a red chili pepper sauce. a coconut curry sauce. and  a traditional lime juice with shallots and sweet potato

a stew with beef brisket, rice, potatoes (a little disappointing because I was not expecting comfort food)

Another place, called Mixtos, we had a chupe con mariscos - a seafood stew.  The broth tasted great- tomato based with a hint of smokiness and contained prawns, a whole trout, mussles, a couple crab claws and even octopus!  It was really good, but the crabmeat was difficult to get to because the restaurant provided only needle nose pliers to break the shell.  First of all, needle nose pliers cannot handle the job because of its shape, and secondly, the shell is very hard and very difficult to break. The only way I was able to get any meat was to make breaks at the joints and use a knife to scrape out the meat.

I was at another restaurant called a piquanteria a day later and got almost the same thing, chupe con camarones.  It was the same spicy red broth (though I requested to make it Peruvian-spicy, which was granted) but had giant shelled camarones (shrimp) and a medley of vegetables: corn, carrots, tomatoes, green chili peppers, avacado and of course potatoes.

Colca Canyon

We booked a day tour to visit the Colca Canyon, the world´s deepest canyon.  Unfortunately, we got the shaft by the tour company. The majority of tourists take the two-day tour which is only ten soles more than the one-day tour, but is basically the same tour with more time at each stop, a nite´s stay at a hostel plus a six-hour trek. My friend was short on time, so we only went for the one-day tour. What happened to us was that we got bounced between two tours, one that started their first day and the other that was finishing their tour. Upon eating lunch, we realized that the tour group was going to return back to Arequipa, thus shorting us of almost half the promised destinations.DO NOT USE ILLARY TOURS for any of your tourist needs.

We left Arequipa really early in the morning (or really late at night) to go to the canyon. As a result of this I was very sleepy and would tak naps along the drive to and from the canyon. What I did see while I was awake was desert landscapes with lotsa cactus trees and agricultural terraces.

The only highlight that we really got to see was the Cruz del Condor.  Many condors take flight around here to hunt and just get some practice with ariel formations.

Inca Avalanche

After Machu Picchu, I slept for five hours then jumped on the 5:35am train to get back to Ollantaytambo for the Inca Avalanche race. I am not a downhill bike rider. I ride my bike down hills, yes, but I do not normally get taxi'd up a mountain or take a ski lift to get to the top of a trail. But I mentioned to KB, the organizer of the race that I was interested in checking out bike trails in the area before and after the race, he convinced me to participate in the race. Amateurs, kids, females and non-serious riders are going to be in it. "It'll be fun!" he assured me. Also, because the roads to Machu Picchu get partially closed during the competition, he needed to get as many foreigners to participate to placate the politicians to show that this is a worthy race to keep having.

I arrived into town, surprisingly pumped up for this race.  I had really low expectations for this- in fact I expected to place last or towards the bottom of the list. On the bus ride up, I was surrounded by teenagers and early 20-somethings. We would catch glimpses of where the trail crosses the road, which was no comfort to me - there were some serious drops! We got dropped off close to the summit of the road, and they instructed us to go up towards the top of the mountain.  Snow was in front of me, but at least we were not riding in snow.

just like my helmet, I approached the race half-cocked

Though the day before was supposed to be a qualifying day to determine what order people were to start the race, it really didn't happen. Everyone just got together at the starting line and started all at once- tearing down the hill towards the road and bottleneck into the first trail.

I was already at the end of the pack even before crossing the first road. Everyone was going a different direction, and of course, I chose the worst path, flipping my bike over a bump. I turned to another rider and told her, "this is going to be a long ride."  By the time I crossed the second road, I was one of the last five riders, and had already started walking my bike across certain drops on the trail. As I hit the third road (by the way, it's all the same road, it just cuts over the race course), and looked down at the next steep drop, I decided to take the road for a little bit.

This move turned out to be a bad decision, for the fact that for this detour, instead of going a half kilometer on the trail, I biked three kilometers on the road. I made another decision to just buck up and take the trails for the remainder of the course.  The trail started to getting flatter, though I still had moments of walking down some drops

On a couple occasions when the course crossed onto the road, I would miss the next trail marker. Usually, the course would jump across the road to the next trail, but these few times, the course was on the road for a turn or two. Because I did not have the benefit of trailing other riders to see where they were going, I would start thinking that I must have missed the trail marker and had to continue on until the next crossover. The only other reason that I could have missed a trail marker was that once on the road, I would pick up so much speed, that I would miss the marker. The marker was either just an arrow spray painted on the road or else some colored plastic ribbon on a shrub that could just be mistaken for a random piece of trash that got caught on the branch.


When I finally got down to the finish line, the final bus to take bikes and bikers up had already left. I really wasn´t disappointed. It was rough going down because of the constant braking and squeezing of the handles. And I am glad that I made it through with all bones intact and only a minor cut along my ankle (I think it was from contact with my high gear on the crank. Though I did not get confirmation about my placement, I can only believe that I finished last in the race. I did not see any other rider cross the line after me.

my only casualty

 

 

The finish line was in the village four kilometers from Ollantaytambo and had una fiesta giganta.  Food stands, beer and chicha were everywhere for a one block stretch. Chicha is an alcoholic beverage made of fermented corn. The traditional method to make chicha is to chew up the corn kernals and spit it out into a container. The saliva triggers the fermentation and the result is a sour, not sweet, beverage that gets a sprinkle of cinnamon. Nowadays, people just boil the corn to make chicha, instead of using spit. Or at least, that is what they are telling us.

a glass of chicha the night before the race

My first taste of chicha was by accident- I wanted fruit juice to drink with my meal, but got this instead, not knowing it had alcohol in it. It was pink in color, why would it be alcoholic? [by the way, it can also be yellow] The initial sourness was made harsher because I didn´t expect to taste sour. Then it started to grow on me, but I still couldn´t get past the sourness and did not even finish it. It was a large glass and I didn´t really like it enough to drink more than half.

Maybe a month passed since that initial drink. The day before the bike race, my roommate told me that there was alcohol in it and that just blew my mind. Had I known there was booze in it, I would have finished it at the restaurant. I found the best way to drink this stuff is to chug as quickly as possible. This way, there is less time dealing with the sourness.