Christmas in Cusco

No Parking

We arrived into Cusco in style, our bus like a flight, reclining seats, hot meals, movies and warm blankets. How can we go back to Greyhound now?

We spent a rather wet and soggy Christmas Eve playing our own private game of The Amazing Race, attempting to get passes for Machu Picchu and Huayna Picchu (they only release 400 passes a day to climb Huayna  Picchu) and the train tickets up through the Sacred Valley, before all the offices closed for Christmas. To make it really fun there were the Christmas Markets on. Sprawling markets that filled the central plaza, stopping all traffic and making it tricky to get from one side of town to the other. But we made it, passes and tickets all sorted. 

Then it was shopping time. A budget, S/200 (AU$80) and a time frame, 2 hours. And we were off, bargaining our way around the markets in an attempt to have something to unwrap come Christmas morning. We even found the world's tiniest real Christmas tree that we decorated with llama finger puppets. 

We had been invited to a NGO charity dinner on Christmas Eve, raising money for children in an incredibly poor community 25 minutes outside of Cusco. http://cooperarperu.wordpress.com/ Sadly much of the profits made in Cusco, Machu Picchu and the Sacred Valley do not reach the communities and children who live in the surrounding areas. The evening was great fun, everybody there were travelers that either volunteered for the NGO or had heard about it the same as us. Wonderfully generous people.

Christmas Day we made our way through the freezing rain to The Real McCoy pub and spent the afternoon with the owner, Sally, a self proclaimed alcoholic fugitive from the UK. We had a proper lunch with all the trimmings, roast turkey and all. And we had a chance to relax and enjoy ourselves in daggy paper hats.

Town gossips

Colca Canyon

Vicuna

El Misti Volcano

Eqyptian Llama

Walking through feild of purple corn

Colca Canyon is the 2nd deepest canyon in the world. And for some utterly crazy reason we paid good money to scale down into its depths and then get up the next day and crawl our way out again. But I am being too harsh. And jumping ahead a bit.

We left Arequipa with a wonderful group of people and drove out across the mountains. We stopped to meet vicunas, a delicate relative of the alpaca, who has only just been brought back from the brink of extinction, and whose wool is worth US$200 per 200grams. We crossed a pass at 4900m which was a shock to all of us, not being able to walk without losing our breath. We froze our butts off in an attempt to see condors, and we did see 3, or perhaps it was the same one coming back to check if we were dead yet.

And then we reached Colca, Colca is huge. Like gargantuan. It was quite terrifying to think that we had to climb down into it. But climb, stumble, trip our way down we did. We started at 3300m, ambling through purple corn fields, and then we dropped 1200m in just under 2 and a half hours. But it was fabulous, you could almost forget the struggle if you just looked at the view, and tried not to look down too often.
At the bottom was an oasis of fruit trees, bright flowers, and a beautiful cool spring to bath in. Just what we all needed to recover. When we woke at 4am the next day, after a fairly comfortable nights sleep in a tent, it was raining. Not the bright start to the long hard climb out we were all hoping for. But to our relief the rain stopped just after we set out, and had actually helped us by settling all the dust. Tough, the only word for it, straight up the side of the canyon in 3 hours. Two of our team, already stuggling with the high altitude, had to be carried out by mule. But at the top, to our delight, what had fallen as rain below, had landed as snow on all the peaks around us. The most wonderful back drop to our triumphant stagger over the top of the canyon! And to top it all off, as we drove back, we saw a beautiful condor swoop over us, close enough to realise the size of it.

The decent

Home away from home

Colca Canyon II

Arequipa, Ice Maidens and Nuns

When we arrived in Arequipa we decided that after so much time in the outdoors we thought we should attempt to do some insidey, cultural sorts of things. So we went to meet Juanita the Ice Maiden, the frozen 'mummy' who was found on El Misti, the active volcano that looms over Arequipa. She is a sad little creature, sacrificed at 14 years old about 500 years ago by the Incas as a sacrifice to the mountain gods. She now huddles in a glass sided freezer, still dressed in what she wore when she died.
Our cultural side also lead us to Santa Catalina, an enormous maze of a convent that was almost self sufficient in its heyday. We spent hours getting lost and hopelessly following arrows around its city like depths.