I’d rather be a Condor than a Nun, yes I would …

Having largely abandoned any further pretence of camping we checked into the most glorious place in Arequipa, formally the Bishop’s residence, full of little courtyards with fountains although they didn’t work, a lovely garden, stone walls, stone steps, high ceilings inside the rooms, and doors that were big enough to get a couple of elephants standing on each other’s shoulder through.  

Doorway, Bishop's Palace, Arequipa

Bishop's Palace

Our stay in Arequipa lasted a full six days, not entirely on account of it being a beautiful city and a delightful hotel, but also because we recalled that every hotel, hostel, cabana and campsite was completely full when we turned up in Mendoza on Easter Saturday last year. This time, having found somewhere decent, we decided to stay put until after the Easter break.

The beautiful central square, the Plaza de Armas, appeared to be very much the focus of the city’s social activity and we whiled away many a happy hour strolling around it or sitting and people watching.  The huge cathedral, which dominates one side of the plaza, seemed to be almost permanently shut and on the one occasion when we found it to be open Alan was turned away on the grounds that his legs were not fit for Peruvian society to see.  Apparently, shorts are not allowed.  

Cathedral, Plaza de Armas

Façade of San Francisco Church

Granite portals on one side of the plaza

With plenty of time on our hands we made a couple of excursions into the countryside around Arequipa. We had a look at some nearby villages and saw some good examples of pre-Inca terracing still in use today and still as functional as it was then.  One village featured a reconstructed 17^th century water mill with the strangest mill wheel that either of us has ever seen.

Pre Inca terracing, village near Arequipa

Strange 17th Century water wheel

Leaving the villages behind we made the long uphill drive to the Laguna Salinas.  It was only 65 km, but it took a couple of hours because the road was dirt with many hairpin bends and steep drops at the side of the road which made Sue rather nervous. When we finally reached the 4,000 metre high plateau, the view that awaited us was worth it.  The lake was large and shallow with duck and flocks of flamingo in the distance and mountains all around. 

Laguna Salinas

Volcan Misti, always visible from Arequipa

Grazing along the shores of the lake were herds of llama and alpaca, being looked after by an old hag who kept coming up and asking for sweets and money.  Sue gave her some bread and meat which was received without any good grace and then when Alan was trying to take some photographs, she kept trotting along behind him murmuring “Maestro, maestro, por favour”.  By the shape of her, which was more or less cylindrical, we didn’t think she was particularly short of nourishment.

Juvenile llama, Laguna Salinas

Herd of llamas grazing by Laguna Salinas

Close up of adult llamas

We also had a monumentally horrible drive to the coast to visit a lagoon based bird reserve. It was horrible because the surrounding countryside, if you can call it that, was sometimes desert and sometimes semi-desert, not even decently desert because there were no nice clean sand dunes, just rocky, shoddy, shabby bits of sandy, messed about hills with nothing growing on them whatsoever.  When we eventually reached the bird reserve the light was already fading but the lagoons were full of bird life and we enjoyed our brief visit.

Turkey vulture at the bird reserve

Turkey vulture too close for comfort

One of the highlights of our stay in Arequipa was our visit to the Convent of Santa Catalina.  This enormous complex is like a city within a city and housed almost two hundred secluded nuns and their servants from the late 16^th century until 1970.  Sue remembered the convent from her visit 13 years ago, and in particular being moved by the way in which young girls were entered into the convent in its early days.  Wealthy families would place their second born daughter at the age of 11 or 12 into the convent as a sort of insurance to square themselves with the Almighty, and there they stayed for the rest of their lives.

The buildings within the convent are absolutely lovely.  There are wonky white sillar stone walls (sillar is the local volcanic stone and a very beautiful stone it is too), nun’s cells with beds in the alcoves (to protect them from the frequent earthquakes),  kitchens with earth ovens and great cauldrons and holes in the ceiling where fumes escaped, various cloisters for the novices and the time served nuns, and lovely barrel vaulted ceilings in places.  There are lovely fountains, a maze of narrow streets, and everywhere you look there are geraniums and hibiscus and oleander growing in profusion.

Cloister, Convent of Santa Catalina

A little corner of the convent

Stairway to heaven, Convent of Santa Catalina

Nun's kitchen

Cloister

Sue on stairway

Street  inside the Convent

Street in the Convent

Convent laundry

Flowering shrub in courtyard

Door Panel detail

Fountain in one of the courtyards

On Easter Sunday we had a very lazy day.  We strolled back down to the plaza which was an excellent place for people watching. There were little children chasing bubbles and each other and beautiful young things posing in front of the fountain and photographing themselves and each other from every possible angle.  Coupled with that, there were sellers of squeaky toys, sellers of ice cream, meat pies, cakes, jellies and bubble making machines.  There was a slightly half-hearted parade that came past the Cathedral with an oompah band and people dancing, so we went and had a look at that.  

Chasing bubbles, Plaza de Armas

Band playing in the plaza

Close up of happy dancers

Dancers in the square

Elderly dancer

Distributing sweets

Sweet dispenser

Dancers

On Easter Monday we left Arequipa and headed for the Colca Canyon, one of several that claim to be the biggest or deepest in the world, also where sightings of Condors are guaranteed. Our journey there took us above the snow line where our altimeter registered 4,900 metres and dear old Lucy was puffing and panting like a marathon runner on the last mile, but she made it. 

What we found when we arrived was a mighty canyon, about 1.2 km deep in places, with varying degrees of steepness on the sides and dramatic craggy rocks with ice capped mountains beyond. The first mirador that we stopped at gave us vertigo.  Standing on the edge of the canyon, we looked down past the pre Inca terraces upon which the locals grow their food and then the whole thing fell away and we were looking over a kilometre down to a crashing river which was so far away that whilst we could see the water and the shimmer of sunlight upon it we couldn’t hear the river. 

Approach to the Colca Canyon

Colca Canyon

Colca Canyon

Colca Canyon

We stopped for the night at a small hotel and then were up at six the following morning to go to the ‘Cruz del Condor’ in the Canyon.  At about eight am several condors appeared, flying with complete mastery on the thermals within feet of us, flying along the valley, then with Immelmann turns on a wing tip and flying back in the other direction to show us their other sides.  This was marvellous, we enjoyed it hugely and so did quite a lot of other people who were also there watching.

Male Andean Condor

Up close and personal

Male Andean Condor showing splayed wing primaries

Adult male Andean Condor

Female Andean Condor

After that we set off in the direction of Cusco which is when things started to go wrong.  The route had been planned on what the map claimed was a tarmac road.  The map however was guilty of a bare faced lie.  It was a dirt road which went up over the mountains up to about 4,500 metres, it was heavily rutted, there were potholes such that you drove down one side of them and up the other. It was narrow, there were hairpin bends, oh and there were big trucks and buses. 

After about four hours we got onto what Sue described as an even more minor road which the map did not even claim to be sealed.  It certainly wasn’t sealed, and it led to a river.  The river was fairly wide and quite shallow, probably not more than about two and a half feet deep but it was running fairly quickly.  There was a bridge, but the bridge was broken in the middle.  Somebody had put a great big pile of earth on our side of it, clearly demonstrating that one should not attempt to cross it.  There followed a discussion about whether we should attempt to drive across the river, but we erred on the side of caution and abandoned the idea.  This of course meant that we had the tedium of driving another four hours along the same mountain road, this time in reverse. Not one of our best days!

After spending an unintended second night back in the Colca Canyon we then successfully completed our journey to Cusco in two days, this time on main roads.  Cusco was once the capital city of the Inca Empire and is the place from which you reach Machu Picchu.  More of this in our next blog post.

From the Arsehole of the Andes to the Birthplace of the Sun

Our two day journey from Cochabamba to La Paz took us initially up through the mountains to 4,500 metres, so not much oxygen there, and then gently down onto the Altiplano with the grazing herds of llama and sheep and occasionally cattle and the odd pig.  Then we dropped down into La Paz.

La Paz is in the bowl of a mountain range and the original city is down in the bottom but around the top of the bowl, rather like an unpleasant doughnut, is the sprawling area known as El Alto.  El Alto is the home of thieves, brigands and ne’er do wells, also second hand tyre salesmen, and dusty stalls selling everything you can imagine.

The city itself, La Paz proper, has narrow streets with high buildings on either side and very narrow pavements.  The pavements were choked with children and adults and street vendors and the roads were choked with big heavy diesels all kicking out thick acrid pollutants which hung in the air.  Coupled with this the city was dirty, many of the buildings ill maintained and when we walked uphill which we couldn’t really avoid, at an altitude of nearly 4,000 metres, it was exceedingly hard work.

Extremely neat power cabling, La Paz

La Paz Central

Typical La Paz street congestion

We did our best to view the sights.  We sat in the central plaza, we visited cathedrals and we fought our way along body choked alleyways to the witches’ market which has been billed as a venue for herbal remedies and other forms of mystical and magical potions.  One of the things that they were selling were what appeared to be mummified llama foetuses which, as everyone knows, are the perfect cure for arthritis, or is it dropsy? 

Cathedral de San Francisco, La Paz

Campesina women outside the Cathedral

Campesina women in conversation

Campesina woman, Witches Market

One of the Witches

At the Witches Market

Open for business

Then we went on the cable car.  La Paz from the air is more acceptable than La Paz from the ground, if only because you are up in the air and therefore away from some of the congestion and fug that is the characteristic of ground level.

The cable cars are very un-Bolivian.  For one thing they are immaculate, they are perfectly presented, and they are colour coded  so that if you want to get to place A you go on the purple one, to place B you go on the blue one, to place C you go on the yellow one, and so on.  We happily did the entire circuit of the city for the grand sum of 22 Bolivianos, or £2.50 for both of us and that involved five different cable cars.

View from the cable car

Cable car, La Paz

View from the cable car

We could see just how tightly packed the houses are and when we went up to El Alto, we could see buildings which were literally clinging to the edge of vertical drops, and in some cases with concrete floors that overhung the vertical drops by a foot or so.  We looked down on people’s washing, on the huge cemetery, on school playgrounds and dogs fighting and on the strange areas where the hillside has not yet been tamed.

Bird's eye view of the washing

La Paz cemetery (full!)

La Paz city from the cable car

Alan rather ungraciously nicknamed La Paz ‘The Arsehole of the Andes’ and after two days we very gladly bid it good riddance.

After La Paz we stopped off for a day at a place called Tiwanaku which is the foremost pre-Columbian site, apparently, in South America.  It was a civilisation that lasted for 3,000 years and at its peak its influence spread through much of northern Argentina and as far as the Peruvian coast.

There’s not much left of it.  It got comprehensively knocked about by the Spanish who of course, scenting gold, ripped everything to bits.  The sites themselves take quite a lot of imagination to bring them alive.  There are a series of half built walls, some rocky terraces, some sunken areas with carved heads, mostly eroded away, which apparently represent the deities of local tribal groups that were subsumed into the civilisation.  

The Gate of the Moon, Tiwanaku

Heads of subjugated minor deities, Tiwanaku

'I wonder when the next train will be?'

We sat still and tried to imagine what the places would have been like at the height of their power, but it is very difficult to translate a jumble of rocks into a living entity and we largely failed.

Our next destination after Tiwanaku was the small town of Copacabana which overlooks Lake Titicaca, just a few kilometres from the Peruvian border.  Copacabana beach in Brazil was apparently named after the Virgen de Copacabana shrine which is in this town (although neither of us understands the connection).

There are two ways to get to Copacabana from Tiwanaku.  The nice lady at our hotel told us that it was very easy to get through the border into Peru and then back through the border into Bolivia which is the way that you get to Copacabana if you’re going clockwise.  If you go anti-clockwise you don’t go through any borders but it’s a much longer way round.  We chose the former.  Bad choice!

Stooks of oats, on the road from Tiwanaku to Copacabana 

Stooks of oats drying in the sun

We managed to completely miss the Bolivia/Peru border, having been misdirected by a little man who sent us along a right fork in the road instead of the left fork which would have taken us to Customs and Immigration.  We continued merrily along the road for some way until we reached the Peru/Bolivia border.  This is when we got into trouble.

Having arrived without an exit stamp from Bolivia or an entry stamp into Peru, there followed a two hour discussion with the Peruvian Customs authorities. They could not quite work out what to do with us.  At one stage there was a suggestion that they might like to put some handcuffs on us, but we think that was meant more as a warning than actual statement of intent.

The options that were ultimately discussed were as follows:

1. That we should go back 44 kilometres to the Bolivia/Peru border where we should have got the entry stamp into Peru and then come back.

2. That they might be able to sort it all out at this border and there were some murmured suggestions of a fine, in other words a bribe.

3. That one of the Customs Officials would go with Alan to Puno, a mere 144 km, to get the matter sorted out and then drive back.

After a certain amount of deliberation and intervention from a variety of well meaning people who spoke English, it was decided that we should go all the way back to the previous Customs post where we should have got our documents stamped in the first place and this we did.  This only wasted a few more hours, but it was a relief to feel ‘legal’ again.

Apart from being home to Bolivia’s most revered shrine (which we were prohibited to photograph), Copacabana is the place from where you can visit Lake Titicaca’s two most sacred islands, the Isla del Sol and the Isla de la Luna.  The Incas believed that the Isla del Sol was the birthplace of their nation and the place where the great Inca God drew forth the sun from a hole in a sacred rock, although quite how they got on before that we don’t know, what with it being dark and cold.

View of Copacabana from lakeside

Door carving, Copacabana Cathedral

At the waterside we organised a boat and a boatman and then had six hours of the most wonderful trip across Lake Titicaca.  The sun was warm on our backs, there were gulls and ducks and American coots around the place, the water was clear as gin and the boat moved at a sedate pace across the ripples.

Isla de la Luna, Lake Titicaca

Seagulls taking flight, Lake Titicaca

Our first stop was the Isla de la Luna, a very small island which has upon it some Inca remains known as the House of the Virgins.  Apparently, a bunch of virgins were brought to the island by an old woman who instructed them in the art of weaving the sacred cloth and also presumably the art of remaining a virgin.  Mind you, given that there weren’t any men on the island this matter might not have been as difficult as would first appear.

House of Virgins, Isla de la Luna

The ruins were quite atmospheric with incised double cross shaped entrances and in one place there were a series of niches where people to this day are putting offerings of money, flowers, fruit, cigarettes and coca leaves.

Offerings in the Shrine to Virgins

The next stop was the Isla del Sol which was a different matter.  It was pretty well rammed with people, locals and foreign tourists, but there were a number of nice hotels and restaurants and we sat on the terrace of one restaurant and had a sandwich and a beer.

The only means of transport on the island is donkeys and we watched them being led down the steep stony track to the beach, then loaded up and driven back up the track to wherever they were delivering. They’re long suffering little beasts, very shaggy but apparently uncomplaining and Alan spent a lot of time annoying the locals by taking photographs of them.

Sole means of transport, Isla del Sol

Pack animals, Isla del Sol

Campesina woman multi-tasking

Loading up the donkey

Campesina, Isla del Sol

Snacking on lake weed

After a pleasant couple of days, we left Copacabana and came back across the border into Peru, this time without any difficulty.  It was then a relatively short drive to the town of Puno where we spent our last night next to Lake Titicaca.  Alan also spent a happy couple of hours with his camera exploring the wetland next to our hotel.

Speckled Teal, Wetland at Puno

Large black pig, not impressed

Andean fox, Puno wetlands

Yesterday, Tuesday 15^th April, we drove 300 kilometres back across the Altiplano and the Andes to Arequipa, Peru’s second largest city, and so our adventure continues.

'Shaun' the Alpaca and friends, Altiplano