Colca Excursion: Peruvian Camelids

Peru boasts two of the world's deepest canyons, both of which are within a day's drive from Arequipa. Of the two, Colca Canyon is the deepest (it measures 4,160 meters in depth; the third deepest in the world after canyons in China and Nepal, and more than twice the depth of the Grand Canyon). It is also home to the famous and endangered Andean Condor, one of the biggest birds in the world.  With these credentials, Amanda and I decided the canyon was worth a visit.

Naturally, like everything else in Peru, just getting to this canyon was a trek, requiring about five and a half hours of driving through the high Andes on paved and unpaved roads. Lonely Planet assured us that we could do it on our own; we decided to hire a guide anyway. After shopping around in the many trekking/travel agencies in downtown Arequipa, we found one (Colonial Tours) that offered a two-day, one night trip that seemed to be a good fit for us.

Early Monday morning we grabbed our daypacks, dropped our big bags at the hotel front desk, and climbed into a van with 15 other travelers: eight other Americans, two Belgians, two Argentines, two Peruvians, and one Japanese woman who lived in London.

About an hour outside of Arequipa, we entered one of Peru's nature reserves and stopped several times to get a closer look at three of the four camelid species that live in South America: vicunas, alpacas and llamas.  The vicunas are the smallest of the three and are still wild.  They have extremely fine hair (it's both light and strong) were once very near extinction due to overhunting; now, they're endangered but not so close to extinction.  Alpacas and llamas are both domesticated but are grazed in herds on the nature reserve, so we were able to see them, too.  The difference between llamas (which I didn't photograph) and alpacas (which appear below) is that the alpaca is generally a bit smaller and has much longer hair, whereas the llama is taller and less fluffy.

Vicunas





Alpacas




Also, I remembered that I had a video function on my camera, so I took some footage of the alpacas:

Arequipa: Sunday Night

On Sunday, after church and visiting the monastery, Amanda and I wandered around the old downtown area of Arequipa.  Although not quite as charming as Cusco, Arequipa is still a lovely city, with many fine examples of Spanish colonial architecture.  Almost all of the buildings (old as well as new) are constructed from the white "sillar" stone, which is a volcanic rock native to the area.  For this reason the city is often referred to as the "white city."  When the white stone cathedral was lit up at night, I thought it looked an awful lot like one of our temples.


La Catedral

After strolling the streets and taking some photos in the last daylight, we found a Peruvian-French restaurant and had supper.  I had cream of mushroom soup and a stuffed pepper that was tasty (but would have been better if they hadn't put raisins in it). 

Cream of Mushroom Soup

Rocoto Relleno (stuffed pepper)

Arequipa: Santa Catalina Monastery

Nestled in the colonial heart of Arequipa is the Monasterio de Santa Catalina, a still-working convent that was founded in 1580 by a rich old widow.  It was a super-selective, prestigious convent where the upper crust sent their second daughters (or other daughters not destined for marriage) to become nuns.  Once inside, the women never left again for the rest of their lives.  They were supposed to be living an ascetic communal life, but since they were all super rich, and since many of them didn't come there by choice, they lived quite a life of luxury for a long time:  they had separate houses, with servants and/or slaves; some even had pianos and washing machines.  All that came to an end in the mid-1800s, though, when the Pope decided to crack down and set them back on the straight and narrow.  Since then, they've opened most of the convent to a public; nowadays there are about 20 nuns, all of whom entered voluntarily and who are authorized to leave the convent from time to time with permission.

The complex itself was really lovely.  It looked like a fortress on the outside, but inside it was brightly colored (with original colors) and had a surprising Arabic flair.  Our guide explained that the Spaniards in the 1500s were still strongly influenced by Islamic architecture and aesthetics after the long Moorish presence in Spain.

Monasterio de Santa Catalina

Entryway
(note the "Silencio" instruction on the arch)

Orangerie Cloister

Images for illiterate nuns

Novices' Cloister

Entrances to nuns' houses



Servants' quarters for a nun's "house"



Music book (before modern notation)



Water filter: top container is porous
volcanic rock; water is purified as it seeps
through to bottom container

Washing Machine

 

Modern nuns live off to the right

Oldest part of the monastery

 

    


 



Mormons in Arequipa

On Sunday, Amanda and I mended our heathen ways and went to church --- and we had such a great time that we're seriously tempted to go to church more often when we travel!

The day started off on a somber note. As we walked to the chapel (which we found after abandoning the church's meetinghouse locator and turning to Google, the other source of truth), we passed a man who was falling-down drunk. In fact, he fell down about fifteen feet in front of us. We crossed to the other side of the street and kept walking. The farther we walked, though, the more I felt like the men in the parable of the Good Samaritan who behaved just as I did when confronted with a prostrate, needy figure. It didn't help to turn around and see that anoyher man had stopped and was helping the guy to sit up. I mentioned how I felt to Amanda; she was thinking the same thing. We talked about it for the rest of the walk to church: what should we have done? We're in a foreign place with no idea whether this person is safe or dangerous and no real way to provide any immediate meaningful assistance. But how dangerous could a person so ill he's collapsed really be? Don't I speak Spanish well enough to ask him if he wants help (and know enough first aid to tell if he needs help), and to call for it if he does? And wouldn't even setting him upright have been more meaningful than the nothing that we did? Whatever the right response to this situation might have been, I'm pretty sure it wasn't crossing to the other side. Clearly I have room to grow in my discipleship of Christ.

The church was only a little ways off a narrow street with the dramatic Misti volcano rising behind it. Of course we instantly recognized the universal church architecture.

Misti Volcano

  

Miraflores Ward building in Arequipa

We went inside and found our way upstairs into the chapel. Almost immediately, one sister after another came over to shake my hand, give Amanda a kiss, and welcome us. Interestingly, only two brothers came over, and that was later (and neither of them was a member of the bishopric).

As you would expect, the meetings were classic Mormon meetings - not only the gospel butalso the culture of the church is essentially the same wherever you go. Sacrament meeting was a standard testimony meeting, running about twenty minutes over because too many people got in line in (what were supposed to be) the last five minutes of the meeting.

Sunday school was really good. Once people realized that Amanda and I were not married, they whisked us off to the single adults class. (Of course, they also expressed surprise that we could be traveling as friends without romantic involvement -- the guy who introduced us into Sunday Scool said to the class, "This is Amanda and Jason, they claim to be single but I don't belive them.") The YSA teacher was fantastic. She was the mother of on of the guys in the class and was both very well prepared and capable of riding herd on a rambunctious class in a way that enabled her to present the lesson as she wanted to. (I could easily cast her as a beloved but terrifying Mother Superior in a Catholic school.) Of course, all of Amanda's teacherly sensibilities were delighted at witnessing another good teacher at work (and in church no less!)

One of the best moments in her lesson was when she likened the disciples' waiting in the garden, while Jesus prayed, to a funeral wake. It was a brilliant move because, although Mormons don't do wakes, Catholics, especially South American Catholics, do. So the teacher was drawing on something that would make a lot of sense in the cultural context while also shedding light on (at least part of) what Christ may have been asking the disciples to do; namely, to sacrifice sleep to support him in his hour of need, even though there wasn't really anything they could do, practically, to help him (just as people at a wake sacrifice sleep in support if the departed).

Priesthood was also vey good. Apparently, every fist Sunday of the month, the lesson consists of practical instruction on how to perform a pristhood ordinance (in this case, blessing the sick), as well as the doctrinal underpinnings for that ordinance. I vaguely recall past wards attempting something along thoise lines, but here I thought it was a great idea and super useful (in a way that EQ lessons so often are not). Of course, I was not expecting them to ask me to be the one to demonstrate the anointing! I declined at first (but they insisted) and told them I didn't feel comfortable doing it in Spanish (they said that was fine), but ended up doing the demonstration anyway. It was fun -- and a good reminder of how important it is to know how to do these things!  (Amanda, too, was put to work. I found her playing the piano for relief society -- there was no one else who could play in the ward.)

By the end of the three-hour block, I was best friends with 26-year-old returned missionary named Ruben, and Amanda was joined at the hip with a woman named Gloria. Ruben and Gloria had taken us under their respective wings during the meetings (and played a key role in impressing us into service as described above). After church, they invited us to lunch with them. We accepted and found ourselves bustled off into cabs (along with a few other ward members) and into a roasted chicken restaurant on the other side of town. They didn't bat an eye at going out to a restaurant on a Sunday! :) We had a lot of fun, ate well, exchanged email and Facebook info, and parted ways with hugs all around.

We had originally planned only to attend sacramant meeting; we ended up spending most of the day at church or otherwise hanging out with the members. We didn't see the museums we'd planned to see, and we almost missed out on booking our Colca Canyon tour, but by the end of the day we had had a ton of fun and been spiritually uplifted, too!

From left to right:  Gloria, Amanda, Me, Ruben, Alexandra, Lucie, Nela

Stranded! (for a minute)

We're about twenty minutes into another long bus ride -- this time from a town called Chivay, in the Colca valley, back to Arequipa. It'll be about 3.5 hours, assuming we have no more delays (we've already had two: first because an American guy in our bus missed the rendez-vous, so we had to hunt through town to find him; second, because --

Dang it! I put the second delay in the past tense too soon. I was about to write "because an American girl on the bus left her phone back in town and made the driver stop and call another driver to have him go pick it up." All of that is still true, but now I have to add the following: "Unfortunately the girl couldn't give specific enough instructions, so our driver decided to turn back to find the phone, leaving all the rest of us stranded on the side of the road in some of the mountains of Peru."

That's right: Amanda and me and our eight fellow travelers are sitting on the side of the road like so many refugees. Watching a storm blow darkly across the valley, right in our direction. (Which makes me wonder: If it turns into a snow storm and we don't get rescued, could I survive by sleelping inside a dead llama, like Luke Skywalker did with that Ton-Ton? I'd rather do that than pull a Donner Party and eat the Japanese lady.)

But I should back up a bit. Here's the short version of events (which eventually will get their own separate posts) since we arrived in Arequipa: First we kept (but later broke) the Sabbath with local church members. Then we joined a group of travelers on a two-day guided excursion back into the high Andes (and believe me, they are very high) so that we could, among other things, spend another freezing cold night in a hotel without heat or hot water and then get up at 4:30am to see some Andean condors fly around in the Colca Canyon, which is the third deepest canyon in the world.

After seeing the birds and having lunch (and finding the American who missed the rendez-vous) we piled into the van and began our long drive back to Arequipa. That's when I started typing this blog entry and, a few minutes later, found myself sitting on the side of the road, with our only means of transport speeding away in the wrong direction.

The reason for our abandonment, apparently, is that the van's speeding will be speedier if we are not all inside t weighing it down. We'll see about that.

[Montage signifying the passage of time: We pose for refugee pictures; our guide tells us more about which shrubs have good resin for making bonfires; the storm comes closer and the first drops start to fall causing me to pull up the hood on my raincoat, Amanda to pull out her polka-dotted umbrella, and the Belgian couple to seek shelter under a rock... Then, lo and behold, our bus rounds the bend -- there is cheering, weeping, slow motion embraces and promises to keep in touch. The music swells...]

Okay, that last bit may not have happened. But our bus did come back (more quickly than I'd expected) and now we're merrily on our way again. I guess I won't have to sleep inside a llama today after all.

(Oh, and in case you were wondering, the girl did find her phone.)

Puno to Arequipa

Another 6-hour bus ride today.  This time from Puno to Arequipa, the second-largest city in Peru.  No good stories emerged from this trip.  The bus wasn't great -- it smelled bad and had cracked windows -- but it didn't break down and had sufficiently good air circulation that the windows remained unfogged the entire time (unlike our last bus, which was impossible to see out of).

Amanda slept most of the way and I spent the time writing the last few blog entries on my Blackberry, reading about Arequipa, reading At Home by Bill Bryson, and staring out the window at the passing countryside. 

As I've mentioned before, Peru is spectacular.  Desolate, but spectacular.  We drove through seemingly endless stretches of absolutely nothing.  First flat nothing, then hilly nothing, then giant mountains and volcanoes nothing.  All the same dirty golden color under lowering grey skies.  We passed virtually no people the entire way, only a few dirty little villages built of mud-bricks and stone.  We did pass, however, quite a few sheep (including some that ran across the road in front of the bus), llamas, and some wild vicunas, one of the camelid species of South America (the others being llamas, alpacas, and something else I can't remember).  The vicunas looked a lot like antelope but behaved like llamas.

We got some serious altitude, too.  The highest point between Arequipa and Puno (which we drove over today) is 14,856 feet above sea level.  Crazy thing is, there were still mountains that were a lot higher than we were...

 

Sheep!

We got to Arequipa sans incident and found ourselves in an ugly, seedy part of town, which I guess is the nature of bus station neighborhoods.  It made me nervous about the city -- we had heard it was beautiful, but I wouldn't be able to tell until we got into the city center.  I asked Amanda if I was a bad person for wishing that South America could be more like Europe, where you could take the train into a town and know whether it was going to be beautiful right away.  She said no.  (Whew!) 


Arequipa bus station

The city center turned out to be verly lovely, and we found ourselves a delightful hotel called Casa de Melgar.  It's an old colonial mansion, full of courtyards with giant geraniums, bougainvillea, and cacti, and our room is a great, high-ceilinged, stone-walled number with a giant wardrobe and great windows.  And, perhaps more importantly given recent experience, it has hot water! (That was the first thing we checked on arrival.)   Boy do I like staying in nice hotels, especially after roughing it in the hostels.  (I also like it when the nice hotels only cost $27 per night.)

La Casa de Melgar

My side of the room

Amanda's side of the room



View of the courtyard from
my side of the room

Courtyard

Giant candles hanging on the wall

We dropped our bags off and tried finding a tour up through the Colca Canyon to see the canyon and its famous Peruvian condors.  It turned out to be a tricker task than we'd anticipated.  Most of the good tours require three days (we only really have two) and require fair amounts of hiking and possibly some camping (which Amanda is not fond of).  We decided to forego the three-day treks; we'll keep searching for a good two-dayer tomorrow.

Another task that was unnecessarily complicated was finding the nearest Mormon church. We figured we'd break our heathen tradition of not going to church on vacation by trying to find a local ward where we could attend at least sacrament meeting.  The church's website, however, does not make finding a local meetinghouse easy.  We ended up spending more than an hour, and many cross references to other map websites, before we found what we were looking for.  Grrr.  So we may or may not make it to church tomorrow -- and if we don't, may our souls rest upon the head of the dear brother and/or sister who designed the stupid meeting-locator feature on the website.

Oh, and we also went to dinner at one of the nicer restaurants in town, run by one of Peru's celebrity chefs.  I ordered ossobucco, which was delicious and very filling, although a bit saltier than I would have liked.  What I particularly liked was when I asked for lemon to put in the water and my Coke, the waiter brought me a little glass of freshly-squeezed lemon juice -- no messy squeezing, and I could put as much in as I wanted.

Ossobucco at Chi-Cha