Arequipa - a gorgeous city beneath the El Misti volcano and two other six-thousanders.
We got to the station around eight in the morning and at the stalls in the station hall I finally got hold of this diary. Nobody was selling them anywhere, but one lady sold me her accounting book :) .
Then for a few bucks again we rode over to an elegant hotel, where, however, they had no room for three, so they arranged us a place in a hotel around the corner. Arequipa is a gorgeous colonial city (0.5 mil. inhabitants), which has the snow-capped El Misti volcano (5822 m a.s.l.) on one side, Mount Chachani (6075 m a.s.l.) on the other, and next to it also Pichu Pichu (5571 m a.s.l.).
We had crazy luck with the accommodation, because above our room there was a smashing rooftop terrace with a gazebo and a gorgeous view of the whole city and the surrounding snowy peaks. We sat there the whole morning in rattan armchairs sipping coca tea. I pulled out the tripod and shot pictures all around. Patrik said he'd rather wait for the soft morning light tomorrow morning. Unfortunately he had no idea yet that we'd be forced to leave at three in the morning :(.
For lunch we popped into a vegetarian restaurant, where an excellent 5-course menu cost 5 Sols (35 CZK).
After lunch we went to visit the biggest local attraction, the Santa Catalina monastery. Founded in 1580 by a rich widow for the children of loaded European nobles. It was the custom to give the second-born child to a convent. So this convent was the luxury version, where about 200 nuns had 500 maids (slave girls), enjoyed food and drink and invited musicians and comedians. All that until the Vatican sent over the tough sister Josefa Cadena, who blew in there in 1871 like a hurricane and put a stop to all the pleasures, released the slave girls and had the main church turned into a bakery, where the nuns had to bake bread for the local poor.
The nuns originally lived in relatively luxurious 80 little houses, lined up into several streets. It really is a city within a city. One part was reserved for the novices, who spent their first up to 4 years there alone and met only at prayer.
Since we wanted to go and see Colca Canyon, we dropped into a local travel agency. After an hour and a half of planning and haggling it turned out that the only chance to make it was to leave at three in the morning and never come back to Arequipa :(. We were terribly sorry about it, because it's beautiful and there was a big chance that early in the morning the volcano wouldn't be covered by fog and would look fantastic in the photo above the lovely city. So once again I won't have a photo for the cover of National Geographic :(. Our evening walk narrowed down to just hunting for dinner. The streets were incredibly lively, the locals were strolling up and down and through all of it squeezed thousands of tiny yellow and stinky taxis. For dinner we eventually picked a tiny grill place with a few plastic tables. We ordered a Grill Mix and a BIG experience awaited us :) . They served us fried liver, that was fine. Then fried something that looked like a carpet. In the end it was beef stomach (tripe). That was still okay. Then there was a sausage, that was cool. The last item, though, was top class. It looked like fried small intestine. It smelled a bit, but it's a local speciality, so I started chewing it. When something squirted from the inside of that little tube into my mouth, though, I realised what the contents of a small intestine are and I didn't take another piece. Patrik, however, wanted to try it properly, so he finished everything after us. For a long time afterwards we made fun of him that we'd had fried shit for dinner :) . Only about a week later we found out it was lymph glands from the neck. Not great either :) . This rough speciality from a part of the cow that most of the world throws to dogs was almost twice as expensive as that 5-course lunch!
On the way home we bought a pile of fruit by the monastery wall (12 sols) and a bottle of red (35 sols). We drank the wine on the terrace and it was horribly disgusting!
