Arequipa lies at the foot of the Colca canyon, which is officially the deepest canyon in the world dropping down 3191m (twice as deep as the grand canyon) and surrounded by several high volcanoes Ampato 6310m and Coropuna 6613m. As Peru's second largest city it has little in common with Lima. The architechture of the city is built with a white rock called sillar which gives it an antique sort of feeling.
We ended up arriving after midnight and had no place to stay. We took a cab with another traveller on our bus and found a hostel with vacancy (pictured below). Arequipa is at an alitutde of 2350m but we didn't seem too affected by the air so we walked around the main plaza of the city, enjoyed an alpaca steak, and explored a few extra neighbourhoods. We visited the museum of Juanita the Ice Princess where a real mummy is kept. She was a young girl that the Inca brought to the summit of Ampato and sacrificed to the gods. They call her the ice princess because she was found frozen but when they returned to excavate the tomb they found that due to recent nearby eruptions the ice had melted and they found her rolled down the mountain. They believe that she had been chosen at birth to be sacrificed because as well being buried with several artifacts and jewelry they found her umbilical cord in her tomb. Although our Inca trail guide disputes the fact that she was sacrificed (instead simply buried) it was still a fairly interesting exhibit. The main plaza is flanked by La Catedral which is one of less than 100 basilicas in the world that is allowed to display the vatican flag. About 17 km from the plaza lies the active volcano El Misti which most recently erupted in 2000.
The next day we decided to do a tour of the Colca Canyon. The night before I had some pretty intense fever dreams. I could not stop repeating the word 'hospedaje' (hostel or lodging in spanish), so I barely slept and the bus was supposed to pick us up at 230, which showed up at around 400. Then we drove 3 hours to Chivay in a tiny bus with negative space for your legs driving back and forth up switchbacks to Chivay which is 3630m high. After lunch the bus trip got even worse, driving about an hour on an unpaved gravel road to an altitude of 3795m. This is where we got to see some wild Andean condors. They were actually quite magnificent and we watched them fly right over our heads for about 10 minutes, and there certainly was no lack of other tourists there either. After the condors disappeared we started to feel the altitude. It really is a strange feeling to be at altitude. You feel tired pretty much all of the time and walking up a flight of stairs makes you completely out of breath. Also the sun is extremely hot and you can get suburned easily yet the air is still very cold. Well altitude sickness combined with a fever does not mix very well. It was about 900 and I was done for the day. All I did was sleep in the bus as our guide rambled on about Alpacas, Llamas, terraces, mountainside tombs.
I did manage to get some information in my stupor however. There are quite a few villages in the canyon where people survive mostly off farming. There are over 25,000 terraces (pictured below) that were mostly built by the Incas. Though only about 5,000 are used now it is quite an impressive sight. There are also several places where the Inca built tombs on the sides of mountains to bury their dead. This wasn't done as a sacrifice but instead they saw the mountains as protectors and in the afterlife they would be safe.
