Peru, in Four Parts (Part One)
One not-so-special night in February of this year, after one drink too many and one plate of nachos not enough, I (drunk) booked a two-week trip to Peru. An impulsive act motivated by a years-long dream to hike to Machu Picchu, I followed through with resolute intention at the end of June, traveling to Machu Picchu to do bad all by myself. This account is as much for me as anyone else.
Part 1: Arequipa & Canyon Country
Wednesday, June 29th, 2016
I arrived in Lima at 2:30 in the morning, nearly 4 hours later than my scheduled arrival and the start of a trend of odd sleep schedules that would continue throughout my trip. The exhaustion of extra, and unexpected, time spent in the Fort Lauderdale Airport clung to me as well as the general stink of airplane farts and other unsavory scents associated with travel, but I was vibing pretty hard on a wave of relief that I made it to Peru at all that night. With an early flight to Arequipa planned the following morning — well, what was now the same morning — a flight cancellation threatened to derail my entire itinerary before the trip even started. Primetime drama.
A breeze through customs, a quick cab ride to a budget hotel in the middle of nowhere, and a cold shower later, I was asleep in Peru.
A few hours later, I hopped back into a cab and headed back to the Lima airport to fly to Arequipa.
Situated in southern Peru near the Andes and flanked by three stunning volcanoes (of which I made numerous unsuccessful attempts to capture with my phone’s camera), Arequipa is a UNESCO World Heritage site and one of the largest cities in Peru. It is commonly known as ‘la Ciudad Blanca,’ or the ‘White City,’ as much of the city’s signature architecture was built out of a type of white volcanic stone known as sillar. While the city center is quite stunning, many tourists to the area use Arequipa as a jumping off point for canyon country travel. Colca and Cotahuasi Canyons are the second and first largest canyons in the world, though Colca is the more well-tread territory of tour companies and travelers alike. It was, in fact, my primary motivation for traveling to Arequipa and the first item of business I intended to suss out upon my arrival to the city.
I had read on a few forums (Hi TripAdvisor, hi!!!) that the best way to book a trip to Colca Canyon was to shop around Arequipa in person either in the main Plaza or on the hostel-lined street of Jerusalen. This seemed easy enough in theory, but much more difficult in practice. The lack of a sounding board for making decisions proved one of the bigger challenges of solo travel for me. I could and would debate myself within my head for hours on end. And so I found myself wandering the streets of Arequipa comparing prices, trek itineraries, and feeling increasingly and completely lost as to how I actually wanted to spend my time in southern Peru. It became abundantly clear I should have brushed up on my Spanish a bit, or at all, before traveling to a Spanish-speaking country by myself. This was not the last time I would have a “oh right, I’m just another idiot tourist” moment of clarity, not by a long shot. I began to realize most of the treks were more or less the same itinerary, more or less the same price, and more than likely too ambitious for me to actually achieve in my short three days in Arequipa. A trek down into the canyon was achievable in 2 days and 1 night, but would require a 2:30 am wake-up call the following day and a serious temptation of the altitude sickness gods. After 45 minutes of what can only be described as total aimlessness, I decided to take a break from deciding altogether and instead visit the Santa Catalina Monastery — a must-see on all Arequipa lists —to enjoy the sunset. Luckily this started at 4:30 pm as Peru’s location south of the equator meant it was winter in June, up was down, left was right, dogs and cats living together, etc. Regardless, I was just in time for some nice sky.
As was not always the case with the recommended sites of the White City — I’m looking at you Juanita Mummy Museum — the hype about the Santa Catalina Monastery held up. Contained within five walled-off acres near the center of the city, the Monastery boasted near full access to the dim 16th century interiors and brightly-painted alleys. I’m not particularly taken in by old churches, but I am a sucker for immersive experiences that transport me to another era and on this front the Monastery succeeded. I could wander from room to room, climb up stone staircases to nowhere, and generally poke around to my curiosity’s content. Adding to the experience was some intense magic hour lighting and a calm of silent due in no small part to the lack of many other tourists present.
Feeling rejuvenated by my achievements in solo tourism, I decided that I would indeed risk altitude sickness and general rest to do a 2 day, 1 night trek to Colca Canyon. I marched resolutely to one of the more Trip Advisor-approved tourism agencies feeling like a bonafide adventurer. But, as the very patient agent contacted the hostel to see if private accomodations were available, my fickle heart swung in the other direction. If this was to be a vacation as well as an adventure, kicking things off with 5% sleep and 95% hiking seemed like a bad idea. As a compromise, I signed up for the one-day Colca adventure tour instead. It still required a 3 am pick-up, but also meant I could spend the next day hanging out in Arequipa and relaxing. I convinced myself this was the right decision and as a reward treated myself to a fancy solo dinner at Chi Cha, one of many high end restaurants from superstar Peruvian chef Gaston Acurio.
Arequipa is located at 7740 feet (2380 meters) above sea level, so suffice it to say, the air up there is a bit thinner. A fact, I did not take into consideration when ordering a variation of the national drink of Peru, an Arequipan papaya pisco sour. It was as delicious as it was instantly intoxicating. By the time the bread basket for two, which included a chocolate-flavored roll that I would happily eat for every meal for the rest of life, found itself on my table, I was tipsy. For some reason, probably to do with my fast-found liquid courage, I decided a glass of Argentinian Malbec made a lot of sense. And, as a lover of food, I felt compelled to order more dishes than my stomach felt capable of housing. So I did. There I sat, at one of the most upscale restaurants in Arequipa, a drunk American surrounded by too much food and speaking not a lick of Spanish. The complimentary bread basket was perfection and not just because of the price tag, the camarones rocoto relleno was superb, the corn tamale was good enough, the Pekingese-style Guinea Pig got out of my dreams and into my car/stomach, and the after-dinner Coca Tea was a terrible idea. The fact that the kind and patient wait staff did not need to throw me into a wheelbarrow and push me to my hotel down the street is the only personal success I could count for the night.
There was some nonsense with needing to change rooms due to close proximity to a night club, but after that all got sorted, I laid down for a sleepless night of jitters thanks to the ill-advised digestif of mate de coca. That would be the same coca as in cocaine, but coca tea has little use as a party favor. Rather, it traffics in the business of alleviating altitude sickness, and as such is a staple of most hotel and hostel lobbies throughout the higher (no pun intended) areas of Peru. Nonetheless, it’s a mild stimulant and a major cause of insomnia for amateur-hour travelers like me. Lesson learned.
Thursday, June 30th, 2016
At the hotel’s complimentary breakfast, a kind older couple from Chicago invited me to eat with them. I was living a ‘say yes to everything’ kind of life, but I could hardly decline to us being the only three people sitting in the courtyard. They gave tips for Arequipa, Cusco (where I was to travel to next), and asked if I’d yet notified my parents that I had arrived safely in Peru. I had. Despite being a grown-ass woman, I still felt compelled to let a few people know back in the States that I had managed to survive despite my best efforts as an idiot tourist.
After checking into a new hotel for very boring reasons that I will preclude here as this post is already approaching ‘tl;dr’ status, I decided to dive into the city of Arequipa — or at least the Plaza de Armas and the streets immediately surrounding it. First up, I visited the main market in Arequipa, the Mercado San Camilo. Though a listed tourist attraction, this market functions first and foremost for locals with rows and rows of fresh fruits, vegetables, herbs, fish, and every animal part imaginable, not to mention buckets of quinoa, chia, maca, and other seeds that would cost you $25/oz at Whole Foods in the States. My bravery did not extend street food, but I did have a papaya smoothie, sin aqua, and successfully avoided diarrhea so I look back on my time at the market with both a sense of accomplishment AND refreshment. The fact I was able to put anything in my body after my massive dinner the night before was a miracle.
At my new hotel — Los Tambos, they were lovely and I cannot recommend them enough — the attendant recommended a double-decker bus tour of Arequipa and its surrounding neighborhoods as a ‘thing to do.’ As a general rule, I don’t do well in group tours. I’m a pretty, okay extremely, impatient person who likes to wander, hates standing around, loves long walks on the beach, etc. I met the suggestion with skepticism, but as it was only 10 AM when I returned from my trip to the market, I figured I had plenty of time to keep exploring and still catch the tour at 2:30 PM. And seeing as it cost the equivalent of 10 bucks USD it felt like economically irresponsible not to do it.
After signing up, I headed off to one of the other must-see sights of Arequipa: The Museum of Andean Sanctuaries, aka “The Juanita Mummy Museum.” Admission was around 20 soles (less than $7 USD), and you could hire a tour guide to take you through the museum. I opted out of the latter option, per that whole organized tours not being my ‘thing,’ and was glad I didn’t. The entire experience consisted of being shuffled into a freezing cold room to watch a 30-minute video from National Geographic made in the mid-90’s about the discovery of the Juanita mummy in one of the nearby — and still stunning — volcanoes. Spoiler alert: she was a human sacrifice to the Incan gods and thanks to cold temperatures on the mountain her corpse froze there by completely preserving it for the edification of posterity. After the film, we were released into the rest of the museum which consisted of a few rooms filled with photos and artifacts found around Juanita’s burial site, and then of course, Juanita herself. Like the person who skips to the last page of a book that I am, I rushed through the first rooms to see the main event. Though the overall museum experience underwhelmed me, I cannot deny that it was very cool (again, with the unintentional puns) to see a centuries-old mummy up close. I spent a good 15 minutes just staring at her, at times by myself in the room, marveling at how well-preserved her person was and wondering if she could have ever imagined such a fate.
After chilling (sorry, I’ll leave) with Juanita, I still had the time, and somehow the hunger, to eat before my questionable bus tour. I also had yet to have ceviche, a dish more famous to Lima, but touted all over Peru as a thing one must eat. My guidebook recommended one particular cebicheria, but when I found it totally empty I decided to look elsewhere for sustenance. I settled on Zig Zag, #4 of all Arequipa restaurants on my trip bff TripAdvisor.com. Sidenote — how did people plan trips before TripAdvisor? It is the BEST. No one paid me to say that, though I won’t say no to retroactive compensation for my praise. I ate creamy asparagus soup — a dangerous game for a lactose intolerant gal like myself — salmon cooked on volcanic rock, and chocolate mousse, but the real highlight of the meal was having my first poop in Peru. While I’d thus far succeeded in avoiding traveler’s diarrhea, my stomach was fighting a little too hard to maintain normalcy, and as a result, all the food I was stuffing down my gullet had chosen an extended stay in my digestive track.
With an extra lightness in my step, I rushed back to my hotel to meet the tourbus. They managed to fill the entire top of the bus with saps like me, many of whom signed up for the full four-hour tour. While it was arguable a tourist trap, I still thoroughly enjoyed it. The weather was perfect, and it was a great way to see a lot of the outer districts of Arequipa in one fell swoop. The suburb of Yanahuara was lovely, and if I had more time in the city I would have loved to explore it more. The tour also gave me an opportunity to ogle the volcanoes from multiple angles. Probably the most important part of the bus tour, though, was it forced me to start talking to strangers. I’m a person who very much values her alone time, but also loves meeting new people and enjoys a very active social life back home. Solo travel really can be as lonely or as social as you want, but to get the latter then you have to get comfortable with talking to strangers. If there’s one major upside to group tours it’s that they offer just that: groups. Of people, specfically. From the vantage point of my assigned bus seat, I met a mother and daughter from Washington state, a Peruvian guy who now lives in Orlando, and a Danish gal who was capping off her gap year in Peru by traveling the country with her parents. None of the new relationships really stuck past our few hours of travel, but it was nice to chat throughout the tour, and I did run into the mother and daughter in the Arequipa airport a few days later. Made the world a little smaller, if only temporarily.
After two hours, and one angry llama encounter at an alpaca factory (They do, indeed, spit when mad. A lot.), I decided I’d had enough. The tour operator put myself and a South American couple in a cab back to the city center. Had a slightly unsettling encounter at a stoplight, as a guy asking for money reached into the passenger side where I was sitting, window rolled down, bag in lap, and grabbed on to my shoulder and refusing to back away while the couple from the back shouted at him. As a slightly delayed reaction, I rolled up the window and once again felt like I was headlining amateur hour on this trip. Wearing a trendy sun hat — I’m not really a hat person in my NYC life — and holding my purse on my lap in plain view shouted “Hey Peru, I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing!” Living in New York City can make you a little cocky on a lot of level. When traveling outside of our mean streets, I think we carry with us the whole “If I can make it there…”. However, just because I can navigate my home city without getting pick-pocketed, does not mean I’m impervious everywhere simply by being a New Yorker.
I swung by the tour agency to confirm that the Colca Canyon day tour/adventure/extravaganza was still happening and I would not be waking up at 2:30 am for nothing. This was part of my processing the decision I consciously made, and not under duress, to not only wake up that early, but to actually pay to do it. As someone who has now paid to run four marathons, this type masochism is pretty on-brand.
A quick authentic Peruvian dinner of crepes, and I was back at my hotel attempting to fall asleep at 9pm (lol). A combination of nerves, anxiety, and general bodily confusion as to what time it was made my goal nearly impossible. Added to that was a barking dog outside of my window, upon whom I began to wish all kinds of violence in exchange for his silence. Specifically, I focused all of my energy on the sound of a single gunshot* followed by quiet — maybe a small whimper. I’m not proud, I was delirious.
*Disclaimer: No animals were actually harmed in this fantasy scenario.
Friday, July 1st, 2016
Despite the brutality of falling asleep, waking up at 2:30 am was surprisingly painless. My third consecutive night of mediocre sleep would catch up to me later in the day, but at the time I felt oddly refreshed. My pickup was scheduled at 3 am, but the bus did not actually arrive until 3:30 am. It was hard not think about those extra 30 minutes of sleep I could have had, but I pushed such thoughts out of my mind in pursuit of that #noregrets life. I found a fairly empty bus, aside from a few chatty Americans — three young college students and a couple from North Carolina. However, these spacious travel accommodations did not last as our bus had many more stops to make until every seat was filled. Although I had a bounty of single seats from which to choose when I boarded the bus, I greedily chose the four-seater row in the back, expecting this would lead to a bit more space for myself to stretch and nap. Instead, I found myself squeezed between a freezing cold window and three snoring French and German students for the three-hour drive to the town of Chivay in Colca Canyon.
The tour was pitched to me as a one-day, English-language guided experience to the main sites of Colca Canyon, including a visit to some hot springs and other sites along the way. What the tour would reveal itself to actually be was a shuttle service for other adventure treks sold by the company, with enough quick stops shoved in between to satisfy the requirement of technically being a day tour in Colca Canyon. The students and a few other pick-ups on the bus were not interested in stopping to observe the magnificent condors, our first official stop on the “day tour,” but rather their main objective was transportation to Cabanaconde where they would begin their descent into Colca Canyon on one of the tours I convinced myself I wanted to do and then changed my mind to this day tour. After a light breakfast in Chivay, a town that seemed designed to be passed through, our guide dropped us rubes at the Condor cliffs and then headed down to Cabanaconde to drop off the rest of its human cargo, promising to return within an hour. Confused? So were we. We were true detecting how we’d been duped as we went along. At this point, we still maintained a level of blissful ignorance. Nonetheless, seeing the condors glide up and over the canyon and back down again impressed me more than I expected. I attempted to take pictures but found it impossible to catch their movement without a long lens and fast reflexes, neither of which I have ever possessed. I walked around the area, grappling with the higher altitude and wondering if I made the right decision to day trip instead of trek. The hour up, our fearless guide returned as promised, with a whole new group of people in tow.
This group included folks coming from various treks that ended in Cabanaconde and were heading to various places like Puno, connecting via Chivay, and foregoing a return to Arequipa altogether. The hot springs stop turned out to be a 15-minute dip into a hot springs-adjacent, lukewarm swimming pool, a stop which caused two Belgian gals to miss lunch and almost miss their connection to Puno, and caused myself and the American couple from North Carolina to become extremely agitated with what we now realized was a total racket. I flirted with some good old-fashioned American customer service rage, which found my guide completely unphased, but the moment I gave up, gave in, and fully embraced that I had been had, the comically mismanaged tour became kind of fun, or at the very least entertaining. My carcolepsy brought on some unplanned naps through the beautiful Colca countryside, but I was still able to take in plenty of stunning valley vistas, roaming alpacas, and volcanoes.
In between naps, I started chatting with two French guys from the Cabanaconde Part 2 Crew, who seemed as surprised their transport back to Arequipa included guided tour stops as we were surprised that our day tour included picking up them. They were heading to Cusco the next day as well, and tentative plans were made to meet up there. I had a healthy does of skepticism whether our friendship would transcend the bonds of the bus ride, but it was nice to have tentative social plans for the first time in my trip. The NC couple also invited me to join them for dinner that evening, so I was basically a social buttefly at this point. The bus ride was a bit of a bust for the true Colca experience, but a boon for new friendship.
Napping to the dulcet tones of the Macarena (not mad) and other audible sundries offered by Peruvian radio, did not keep a killer migraine from creeping into my brain that was likely a cocktail of sleep deprivation and the significant altitude changes throughout the day tour. Though the tour itself felt like a headache, a little time away from it and I’m already looking back on it as one of my fonder memories of my trip to Peru.
As I traveled to meet the couple for dinner, a large protest formed in the Plaza de Armas on the steps of the Cathedral. It had something to do with a young student or students who were detained, and the crowd sought justice. That was all my poor (read: non-existent) Spanish allowed me to glean, but there were drums, megaphones, candles, and chants that indicated this was serious business. Adding to the sense of intensity were about 10 police officers observing quietly, dressed in riot gear with tear gas cannisters at their sides. I did not feel an immediate sense of danger, but I also had no way of really knowing, idiot tourist that I was. We ate on a terrace overlooking the plaza, and could hear the protest continue for another hour or so, thankfully without major incident. At dinner, we discussed politics and our lives and our jobs and our plans for the rest of our respective trips to Peru, but my headache had intensified and I had to cut out shortly after dinner.
My brief time in Arequipa felt almost as packed with experiences as my stomach was with food and this was only Day 3 of my vacation. The saturation of activity made it hard to have immediate perspective as my time would down there, but it proved to be the perfect place of entry for me into the magic and possibility of Peru. I was exhausted, but energized by this beautiful city.
As I prepared to leave Arequipa, I promised myself a restful, healthful first day in Cusco. A promise I would of course break, and with #noregrets.
