Donde la cerveza? and other questions

After the altitude,, bombast and beetles of Puno, and having gained time through not kayaking for days, we decided to veer off course and head to the Southern coast and Arequipa while the Dawson family returned to the lake for a couple of days at a homestay on the floating islands.

Arequipa is a gentle city, with an air of calm and serenity.  We had driven there from Puno as part of a bus tour that took us past some distant flamingos and an overnight stay in a spa town, Chivay, perched on a dusty plateau.  We ambled around the main square ‘ fresh and green despite the empty nature of the outlying streets.  We played a game of pool on an incredibly lopsided table in an unmanned Irish pub and watched a local football match in a spaceship like stadium with half a roof – though that half was handy when the rain briefly made an appearance.

The main point of this diversion however was the Canon de Colca, a staggeringly vast canyon cut through the volcanic rock..  Over 3000m deep, it is the second largest land based chasm in the world, to its shorter neighbour in Peru.  It´s twice as deep as the Grand Canyon, though the top line is variable and the highest point is measured from the top of overhanging mountains.  We weren´t quite along the top but still high enough.  We set off along the trail, scorching our way into the distance until the hands of time dragged us back for the bus on to Arequipa.

We had a day in town, mostly spent exploring an old nunnery built in the 1500´s and full of nooks and crannies.  For the first 300 years it had been a relative den of iniquity, founded and funded by a rich European, the nuns were given to organising musical festivities and generally living it up until the Pope sent a stern old Dominican to scare the women back to Europe.   Women who had been servants and slaves to the nuns stayed on to be nuns themselves.  We had a lunch from a menu featuring Sandwiches of the Saints, but afterwards Tom didn´t seem to have noted the Dominican edict when he strode up to the counter and enquired in an expectant tone ´Donde la cervezañ?  After a startled waiter had attempted to fathom the question wild gestures eventually led him to the relief of the servicios instead.

Having got as far as Arequipa, and with the bus back to Cuzco going back the way we had come, via Puno, we instead marched on up the coast to Nazca and a double dose of night buses.  MOre on that next time, I´m off to jump off a cliff.  (Attached to a parachute.)

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