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We spent the next few days exploring the streets of Arequipa as well as seriously shopping for warmer clothes. Karen and Cheryl caught up with us late one evening after riding the buses all the way up from Santiago in Chile. They are keeping their boat Interlude IX in Guatemala up the Rio Dulce and were hooking up with us for a month starting here. We planned to do the big trek to Machu Picchu together. Our hotel turned out to be rundown and after two days we moved to much nicer digs at the Terra Mistaca built around a colonial courtyard three blocks from the Plaza de Armas. The move was arranged for us by Edision who I had met at the bus station and he proved his worth a couple of times with guides and accommodation. We spent all of Saturday and Sunday just wandering the streets of the old city sucking up the ambience of the old town, first settled in the 1540s. The cities colonial masonry construction is built from silar, a white stone that literally gleams in the light giving Arequipa its moniker of the White City. Its impressive main square the Plaza De Armas is centered by the Cathedral on one side facing three sides of an arched colonnade back dropped by a snow capped Mt. Misti. The city has a number of historical sites to see including the Convent de Santa Catalina a small city in itself which had a controversial role in the Catholic Church for its acceptance the nobilities daughters and their rich dowries, a practice outlawed during one of the churches many self serving reformations, really just a kind of a pay as you go plan for the rich. There is also an archeological Museum displaying mummies including Juanita a sacrificial virgin recently discovered buried in the ice up on the Alto Plano. For us we were using the city first to acclimatize to the altitude at 2650 meters and secondly as a base for a trip up to Chivay to see the Colca Canyon, second deepest canyon on the planet and also the best place to see the Andean Condors. After that we planned a short return to Arequipa before heading on to Puno on Lake Titicaca and then on to Cusco and the trek.
To be continued
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