Arequipa
The bus ride from Cusco to Arequipa was a rough one. I used the same company as before, Civa, but there was no spontaneous upgrade this time, which meant that the seats were normal-sized, and there were no blankets, no pillows, no movies, no curtains between the seats, no free snacks. Thankfully it was half the length of the other one (just 11 hours instead of 22), but given the choice, I'd much rather take a longer ride in luxury than a shorter one with just the basics.
The bus left Cusco around 7:30pm on Sunday evening, and arrived in Arequipa at 6:15am on Monday morning. I took a cab to the main plaza, without having written down the address of my hostel. I figured I would just find a cafe with wifi to look it up and go from there, but there were NO cafes open at that hour. I found a Starbucks and assumed that it would open at 7:00, but alas... I had to wait 90 minutes on a bench for it to open. I sat on a street bench and read my kindle, which was plugged into to my remote charger, and felt like a very technologically savvy hobo from 6:30 to 8:00am.
I checked into my hostel, Maycawasi, around 1:30pm, and didn't get out much after that except to grab some food with my hostel room mate, Marcel. We got Chinese food takeout, and some beers, avocados, and mangos from the grocery store, and then stayed in at the hostel the rest of the night. Arequipa seems to be a pretty mellow place, despite being the Peru's second largest city (Lima is first). There are plenty of good restaurants and good shopping, but not much to do that is unique to the city. Aside from the Monasterio de Santa Catalina (the $12 entry fee to which I decided was too extravagant), I think most people come here as a launching point for Colca Canyon tours and hikes, but perhaps there are secret gems about this city that I am completely unaware of.
The plaza is beautiful, though -- that's for sure.
On Tuesday and Wednesday, I spent my afternoons at a coffee / chocolate / craft beer place called ChaqChao. (Oh, it feels good to be able to indulge in all of those things again...) Early Wednesday morning, Marcel left for his Colca Canyon trek, and later that day, Jordan took his place as my room mate, who was just returning from a multi-day canyon hike. I invited Jordan to join me later at ChaqChao, and while we were there, he told me all about how he and his hiking buddies had done LSD while camping in the middle of the canyon. And about how he rented a motorcycle and smoked pot before he rode it. And I was like JESUS CHRIST, DUDE -- how can people do drugs + risky activities at the same time?? At least when I do ayahuasca, that's the ONLY thing I'm doing, ya know? Crazy kids...
Colca Canyon Tour
I signed up for a Colca Canyon tour using some deal through Viator.com. However, I didn't read the package super carefully, and I missed the fact that it was just a tour... not a trek. I had really been looking forward to doing some canyon hiking, but there was none of that during the two-day tour. Fortunately, though, it was still a great experience (lazy, but good).
The highlight was definitely the horseback riding. Strangely, no one else on my tour bus had signed up for horseback riding, so they were all dropped off at their hostel in a town called Chivay, and I was taken to a different, smaller town, which had a hostel closer to the horse stables. A man named Oliver was my horseback riding guide, and we rode Benedicio (the brown one) and Silver (the white one). We took the horses up some pretty steep and narrow trails, which made me feel like a much more advanced rider than I actually am. My horse was pretty easy to direct, but barely needed direction anyhow. The one "eek" moment was when Oliver asked if I wanted to try galloping once the trail had flattened out. At first I said no, because I've never done that and I didn't want to risk ruining this perfectly pleasant experience by bouncing off my horse. Then I felt like I was being a wuss, and I changed my mind. So we reviewed how to change your riding position when galloping, and he assured me that once I was ready to stop I just needed to yell, "okay Oliver, stop!" and he would get my horse to slow down to a walk again. I lasted about 3 seconds before I felt like I was going to bounce off and yelled for Oliver to help me stop, but that was fine with me -- I GALLOPED. IT COUNTS.
Here I am atop Benedicio feeling like a real caballera:
There were so many gorgeous views of the canyon and surrounding mountain desert, but taking video or non-blurry photos on horseback is quite difficult. Here's my best attempt:
It took about half an hour on horseback to reach the hot springs. I only had about 20 minutes to enjoy them before we needed to get back on the horses, which -- including time for changing into and out of my swimsuit, walking across the bridge and walking between the different pools -- really only left about 5 minutes to enjoy one outdoor pool, and 5 minutes for an indoor pool. Fortunately, that's all I really needed to appreciate it by myself (had I been with friends to chat with, I could have stayed much, much longer).
Here's a shot of the hot springs (or "Baños Termales") across the river, although they're a little hard to see since they're in the shadows. They are pretty squarely in the center of the photograph -- there's about three outdoor pools with stone walls around them, and the hut above them had three more hot springs pools indoors.
Had to cross this rickety bridge to get to the hot springs, but that just added to the sense of adventure.
View of the outdoor pools from outside the hut with the indoor pools
The rest of the horseback ride was about two hours. We stopped to explore some pre-Incan ruins...
(When I asked if these were real human bones, Oliver said they were, and then joked that they were the bones of a tourist. *cue nervous laughter*)
...and check out these bizarre holes in the sides of the cliffs:
Oliver explained to me in Spanish what these holes were, but it went completely over my head. All I could pick up was that the holes were called "colcas," which is how the canyon got its name. Thanks to the internet, I can now fill in the blanks of what he was probably trying to tell me: "The name Colca refers to small holes in the cliffs in the valley and canyon. These holes were used in Inca and pre-Inca times to store food, such as potatoes and other Andean crops. They were also used as tombs for important people." (In case it isn't obvious, my Spanish progress has stagnated. I am only at 44%, and already 2/3 of the way through the Spanish-speaking portion of my journey. I'm going to do my best to pick it up a notch and get somewhere between 80-100% Duolingo fluent by the end of my time in Bolivia. I'll have a stretch of over a week in Santa Cruz where I can catch up as much as necessary, so I think that's realistic.)
I got back to my hostel around 5:00pm. None of the meals were included in this package except for breakfast, so I had to go into the town to find some food. It got dark around 6:00 and I could find only ONE restaurant that was open, a place called Cocafe. I had a glass of mulled wine and a bowl of chicken noodle soup for dinner (Everything I consumed needed to be warm and cozy, because the mountain desert was getting very cold with the sun down). Back at the hostel, I thought about taking a shower and decided I'd just do it in the morning, opting instead to read Blink by Malcolm Gladwell until I got too sleepy to read anymore...which was at 8:15.
The next morning, I had to meet the tour group in the town plaza at 6:30. I set my alarm for 5:30 so I'd have time for a shower and a quick breakfast at the hostel at 6:00, but the water in the shower was cold -- and I can think of very few things that stress me out as much as a cold shower -- so I decided being a little stinky and oily-haired for another day was more bearable. This meant I had gone five nights in a row without bathing. I am writing this blog from Puno, where I have still not showered, which means it's been six nights. I know this is largely irrelevant information that will just gross you out, if anything, but I am weirdly proud about how okay I look and how little I stink at this point (as far as I can tell). Don't get me wrong -- I am DEFINITELY showering later today and looking forward to it (assuming this place has hot water*, otherwise I will be so sad), but it's kind of nice to know that I can handle a week of not showering if I need to. That's all.
Day Two of the tour began with a stop at a small town to visit their ornate Spanish church and peruse the market. Photos of the church are below; I didn't think photos of the market would be very compelling (markets are pretty much all the same, but then again, I guess so are the churches), but now I wish I had, because in addition to photo opportunities of people with llamas, some of them also had pet falcons! Llamas are adorable, but a pet falcon really elevates one's badass status.
Next, we stopped for 90 minutes at a condor-sighting viewpoint and saw about six of these impressive creatures roaming the sky:
More shots from miscellaneous viewpoints along the canyon:
These terraces are still owned and cultivated by descendants of the pre-Incan people who created them; they keep getting handed down generation to generation. I really, really love the way Peru has allowed its native cultures and people to maintain their way of life. I wish we could do the same for the Native Americans of North America.
The tour bus dropped us back off in Arequipa around 4:30pm, and since my bus to Puno didn't leave until 10:45, I had about 5 hours to hang at Starbucks and take advantage of their wifi. The 6-hour bus ride from Arequipa to Puno was, fortunately, a fairly luxurious one (large, comfy seats that reclined to 160 degrees, blankets, and complimentary tea). We arrived in Puno this morning at 5:00am, right at sunset. As I was disconnected from wifi and not able to message my AirBNB contact to see if he would be awake and willing to let me inside at that hour, I decided to get breakfast and read for an hour and a half at the bus stop before catching a taxi into town. The AirBNB turned out to be a hostel (this has happened several times), but I was able to get in around 7:30 and have breakfast (yes, it was my second breakfast, but I have never been one to turn down free food and that is especially true as a traveller).
I just enjoyed a pizza dinner at a cafe with wifi, and I got my absentee ballot request and Federal Write-In Absentee Ballot forms all printed out; now I just need to find an internet cafe with a scanner so I can email these in and not have to waste time finding stamps, a post-office, and waiting for them to arrive over snail mail.
Tomorrow I will take a day trip out on Lake Titicaca to see the floating reed islands and the island of Tequile, come back for one more night in Peru, and then take the bus on Monday around the lake and across the Peru-Bolivia border. I've got everything I need for my on-arrival Bolivia visa, and I'm pretty pumped about the itinerary:
BOLIVIA ITINERARY
2 nights in Copacabana (coast of Lake Titicaca), day trip to Isla del Sol
7 nights in La Paz (going to finally get that Brazil visa and celebrate my 31st birthday!)
4 nights in Rurrenabaque, including 3D/2N for Amazon Pampas tour
4 nights in Uyuni, including 3D/2N for a tour including the Uyuni Salt Flats and Laguna Verde (hot springs)
5 nights in Tarija (Bolivian wine country)
9 nights in Santa Cruz
The more I look into and get other travelers' advice about the places I'll be going, the more aware I become of these INCREDIBLE opportunities that are also quite expensive, and it is so difficult to budget my funds in a responsible way; it's a constant battle between on one hand knowing I'll probably never get the chance to do or see a certain thing again and wanting to seize the opportunity (I can always save money later, right...?), and on the other hand knowing my life will be totally wonderful and fine without, say, going on a tour of the Mulu caves, or seeing every recommended beach in Brazil, or seeing orangutans in their natural habitat in Malaysia, or taking a scuba diving course in Koh Tao, Thailand. (Of all those options, actually, I think the scuba diving certification would be the coolest, especially because then I could scuba dive anywhere else through SE Asia and back home or anywhere else.)
I thought I was overwhelmed with all the things I wanted to do in life when that life was more or less limited to my day to day activities in Seattle. Now the whole world is telling me what's out there, and there's just too much to see and do in one lifetime. I have to remind myself that this does not need to be discouraging or frustrating news, though. To the contrary, it is something to give thanks and be thrilled about, for it means we will never run out of potential adventures.
*They did not have hot water. I took a very quick hair-washing shower only and have resolved to make "hot showers" a filtering feature for every new hostel or AirBNB search from now on.