Peru Part 2

We entered back into Peru from La Paz to Puno where we stayed one night. The following morning we caught an five hour bus to the city of Arequipa.

Arequipa is at 2300 metres above sea level which has been a really nice change compared to being at around 3600-4200 which have been at for the past couple of weeks.

Arequipa is known as the white city due to the pale stone used the build the buildings in the main town center. It was a popular choice for rich Spanish immigrants in the 1600’s and most of the main towns shops are housed inside old colonial style mansions.

A main attraction is the visit an old Catholic monastery which was once the home to 500 nuns. There was a tradition that if the second born child was a girl and the parents could afford it, she was sent to the monastery to live her life as a nun. After four years as a novice in almost solitary confinement the nuns became fully graduated where they lived a peaceful life with servants to cook and clean for them. This experience didn’t come cheap for the family’s of the girls meaning it was the affluent of society who did this. We were told that the women could leave if they wanted to but it would bring great shame upon their family. It was really interesting to visit as the grounds are almost like a small city within a city. Nowadays there are still some nuns who live in the renovated and separate part of the monastery that cannot be visited by tourists. They are their by their own choice and their family’s do not need to pay a dowery.

The second, slightly more light hearted place we visited was an alpaca wool processing factory. We were able to see the different stages of wool from the animal itself to the final product spun into yarn. We got the feed the alpacas and llamas alfalfa sprouts and pat them!

We found the food to be quite expensive in Arequipa with most places catering to tourists with bigger budgets than us in fancy restaurants. We were pretty happy with this small pasta place we found where you customise your pasta (chicken, blue cheese and mushrooms in a bechamel sauce yes) for $7 a portion. We went there twice.

The other unusual place we visited was a potato restaurant that specialises in cooking seven different types of Andean potatoes with different toppings. Matt had his with alpaca stroganoff.

Our final funny moment was visiting a very old church in the main square. The Church itself was nice but what we really remembered was the Peruvian twist on this painting of the last supper. That’s Jesus feasting on a whole guinea pig, corn and potatoes and Judas has a monkey with a devils face on his back 😂😂😂😂.

After three days we joined the Peru Hop bus which would take us all the way to Lima with a stop in Nazca, a night in Huacachina and a night in Paracas.

The brief stop on Nazca allowed us to see three of the hundreds of Nazca lines from a viewing tower. These are believed to have been made thousands of years ago by the Nazca people for various perceived reasons. The most common theories were for the Nazca people to measure the weather and solstices from what lines the sun hit or as a way to communicate messages with the gods they worshipped in the sky.

Huacachina

Huacachina is a very small oasis in the middle of desert equipped with lots of hostels, restaurants and bars, eleven hours via bus from Arequipa. We spent two days and one night here where we went sand boarding and dune buggying on the massive sand dunes. We were doing really well and then Matt wiped out and got a mouth full of sand on the final big dune.

The following day we headed to the small fisherman’s town of Paracas where we spent one night. We had seafood for lunch and our final pisco sour before beginning the bus ride to Lima. On the way to Lima we stopped for a tour of an old colonial house located on a cotton plantation. The house was beautiful except for the awful history that accompanied it. The house has important significance due to its role in the slave trade in Peru. Underneath the house are extensive tunnels, reaching all the way to the port which were used to smuggle and illegally keep slaves who worked in the cotton and sugar farms. Luckily this was abolished in the 1850’s and the house is now run as an educational facility and five star hotel.

We arrived in Lima at 10pm where we spent the night before flying to Panama City on the 4th of June. Hasta Luego to South America and Hola to Central America where we will spend the next two months.