Diarios de Peru - 2

Smelly socks in the desert mountains

The bus ride to Arequipa was very long but comfy.  It was mostly a drive straight down Peru's coast and into the first range of the Andes. Peru has a lot of geographical diversity for its size. Going inland from the Pacific, you cross coastal deserts and arid mountains, then you climb the icy heights of the Andes mountains, then pass through the windswept plateaus that extend into Bolivia (called the Altiplano) and finally descend into steaming tropical jungle defined by the basin of the Amazon which forms in Ecuador but reaches its full adult size in the rainforests of northeastern Peru.  I'll stop here because I could keep droning on when it comes to information.  All I want to say is that the road to Arequipa takes us through the dry coastal areas ( nerd alert : they are dry because they are on the leeward side of the mighty Andes with respect to the southeast trade winds) and the landscape looks awe-inspiring - just barren wilderness with mountains on one side of the Panamerican highway and the ocean on the other.  Take away the water and it's almost like the moon's surface or pictures of Afghanistan you saw on TV.  We go past the dunes of Huacachina (where you can go sandsurfing some of the largest sand dunes in the world)  on our left and the islands of Ballestas (where you can see penguins) to our right before the bus begins to cross the first range of the Andes and the scenery begins to change a little bit.

The bus is a double decker delux vehicle run by Peru's premiere bus company (Cruz del Sur).. There are reclining seats, AC, bathrooms, reading lamps, blankets, dinner and breakfast on board, and even a game of housy that the stewardess insists I play even though I understand none of the announcements.  My copassengers on the lower deck include three couples - one German, one Hispanic and the other are two French men really.  This is where I break my travel narrative to give you a very important travel tip.

The importance of having a spare pair of shoes, and a whole wardrobe of socks, and if possible some sort of foot deodorant,  while traveling hardcore, cannot be over-emphasized.  I think I hadn't had the time to change socks since Florida (that was all a multi-hour car, plane, and bus ride ago),  and got told off  by the stewardess for my stinking shoes.  I have reason to believe that she did this because of complaints made by the German couple.  They soon transfer to the upper deck, and I curse the finicky Deutsch duo that they be  stuck with stinking unbathed hippies for the rest of their trip.

There was no other such embarrassing incident on my way to Arequipa, which turned out to be an old world colonial city dramatically ringed by five looming volcanoes, including one where the most celebrated Inca mummy was found.  Like all colonial cities in Latin America, the city  is built around an impressive town square (called "Plaza de las Armas" in Peru, "zocalo" in Mexico) which is dominated by a towering cathedral.  One of the important sights in Arequipa is the Santa Catalina monastery,  where good little nuns have been cloistered since 1579.  It is like a small self contained town unto itself with very high prison-like walls.  The pastel-shaded walls, serene courtyards and geraniums in the gardens make for good photography.  There are exhibits here and there to do with life in the monastery - ancient-looking harps and a giant contraption to press bread into fine wafers.  I concluded that making good food and good music must have been the primary sources of entertainment for the inmates.  I found physical evidence of the former after tasting delectable pastries at a patisserie run by the nuns. The other touristy thing to check out in the city is the frozen mummified body of the Inca maiden  "Juanita". "Maiden" is such a quaint word but that's what the guidebooks used. For a moment I toy with the imagery of hoards of bearded arcaheologists descending on the pit where a poor mummified female body of uncertain age was found, to inspect first thing whether it had an intact maidenhead.. The girl who shows us around the museum of the University of Santa Catalina (this is where the mummy is housed) speaks good English and has very nice likeable hips (I restrain my thoughts about her maidenhead and concentrate on Juanita instead). These Inca mummies are different from those from Egypt, in that no artificial preservatives were added.   They were just sacrificial victims killed or left to die in very high mountains where they froze and remained intact. On the whole, Arequipa is a quiet and pleasant little city, great to walk around for a day, and is full of mummies and monasteries that very much quenched my appetite for morbid stuff.

Early next morning found me on a tour bus to the nearby Colca canyon. The bus threaded its way once again through the arid lunarscape till we found some verdant meadows at higher altitudes which were being grazed by herds of alpaca and llama. Ever since a llama chewed captain Haddock's beard and spat on his face, a llama has been the Bong kid's idea of  teddy bear.  What many Bong kids don't know is that these camelids,  these "odd-toed ungulates",  never really spit and are called "yamas" (as in god of death) and not "lamas" (as in shaven headed wine robed Tibetan monks) by the locals. 

Colca threads out a very deep gorge through the arid mountains, that in places like the famous spot called Cruz del Condor, drops steeply by about 1500 meters (making it deeper than even the Grand Canyon). It is an awesome spectacle in its own right but imho is much narrower and lacks the wind-sculpted features that make its Arizona cousin more illustrious.  The Cruz del Condor is so named because one can often see condors using the warm updrafts of air from the deep gorge to glide above it, as they look for a chinchilla or two amid the rocks. Sure enough, after about half an hour's wait, I was lucky enough to see one,  bald vulture neck and black wing marked by splotches of silver alright - another curious creature straight out of the Tintin books.