The White City

I'm aware that we havnt really done much blogging about Arequipa (the city we are living in), and since we are both absolutely loving it, I thought it should have a mention. The city is in a desert region of southern Peru, about 2 hours from the coast on a bus, and was only founded about 380 years ago by the Spanish- so all of the architecture is colonial (the buildings in the city centre are all made from the local white volcanic rock- hence the city's nickname), and the vast majority of the population fair skinned and catholic. At first it felt strange coming from places which had a deep Inka history and traditions to a place where there are virtually none... but as the Ariqipenans say "Arequipa is not Peru" (They have a joke sort of AQP passport thing, and really hold themselves apart from pre-catholic Peruvian culture). Once I got used to this attitude the city really started to grow on me.

The Plaza de Armas and the cathedral

The monastery

There are several dormant volcanoes around the city- one is called El Misti which is 5,800m (steve wrote about climbing up there a few weeks ago, and the other is a cluster of 5 vlocanoes- the highest being Chachani (6,100 m). Theyre really stunning things to have in the cityscape, and at night they glow pink as the sun sets. In fact they are problably my favourite thing about the city- Sometimes I feel like cities lack an empathy for the natural world...it seem to get swallowed up in the bustle, but you really cant help but feel humbled every time you look at them. I felt my second earthquake since Ive been here last night. It was only about a 4 on the earthquake scale, but it woke me up. Felt like a massive train was passing right outside our apartment and the cupboard doors rattled for about 30 seconds. I always thought earthquakes would freak me out (and Im sure a big one would!) but I enjoy the little ones. I feel comforted that theres something bigger and stronger than mankind. Hah!

One of my favourite things about the city is San Camilo Market. It doesnt smell like rotting death like most big Peruvian markets Ive been to- not even in the butchers section. And you can buy pretty much anything here. Every town has its own area of production in the selva (jungle), so pretty much everywhere has a good supply of farely local exotic fruit and veg. Papaya is my new favourite fruit- I've never really appreciated it before now.

yum

yuck

Its not just food in the market though, theres ALL sorts of stuff. I found pretty much the only evidence of arequipenan non-catholic belief in at the stalls that sell tea and herbs. Some of the vendors also do coca leaf readings for customers, as well as selling dried animal fetuses (not exactly sure what the animals are...maybe foxes or something) which are used as sort of sacrificial offerings to the mountains when people need to ask for something. They are put into a bundle of offerings such as food, coca leaves and gifts, and ceremoniously buried on the mountains. My Spanish teacher said he has a friend who is a 'wizard'- a kind of traditional healer (although theyll also put curses on people for you if you want!!) - who apparently buys human fetuses from the dodgy abortion clinics to use instead of animals. He said the remains just get fed to the dogs otherwise. This tale sounds a bit tall...but I dont think its far too tall to be true.

On a lighter note, here are some pictures of our apartment. It's in a quieter part of town, across the river from the center and close to my work. It's an open plan 'studio' apartment on the third floor, built onto the side of a house. Im really happy we found it- it seems to be a handy location for everything. Our neighbours are the very nice family who own it and live in the main house, and an eccentric, creepy, sexist old guy from Florida who lives in the ground floor apartment (who we avoid).

Back to my favourite topic of conversation- food. There are some great cheapy little lunchtime places on our street, one of which is a cevicheria- a place specialising in the traditional dish cevice. This is marinated chunks of raw white fish in a spicy onion chili and lime salad. They serve it with corn and sweet potatoes. Yum. Peruvians cant get enough of corn and potatoes.

Ceviche

So it's all good in Arequipa- the baby avos are coming along nicely too!

Fodder

Hello! I havnt written on this for what feels like ages. We worked out today that we´ve been in Arequipa for nearly a month now. Can´t believe it´s been so long!! We hadn´t done any of the tourist things in the city until today, when we went to a very good archeology museum and saw a 500year old ´íce princess´- a 12 year old girl who was sacrificed on top of a nearby volcano as an offering to calm the mountain gods who were v.upset and causing lots of volcanic erruptions at the time.

Last weekend we went to a very tasty gastronomy fair that was held just outside town, (where we met these little fellas, who´s fate is unlikely to be better than the ice princess´s) and got inspiderd to blog a bit about Peruvian food - which is SO good! a bit too good infact, as I seem to have got myself a few foody friends in my stomach from all the streetfood munching ive been doing...but thats another story. Nice.

So where to begin? Maybe with the avocado tree we have in the garden of our apartment. Not sure how fast avos grow, but hopefully theyll be ready before we move on in a few months, as we can pick them from our bathroom window. We are both tremendously excited about it.

It´s been fab having our own kitchen since we got here, although when we moved in there was just a gas hob for cooking, and I´d got myself all excitied about baking when we were apartmen´-hunting...so Steve splashed out a bit and bout us a mini oven which is amazing! its sooo mini- and it bakes cakes perfectly. And it cost about 35 quid which seems like a lot of money nowadays, but not for whole oven with bags of baking potential!!!

The fruit and veg here is amazing- I´ll get some market photos posted when I´ve got the patience (it´s running a bit thin now as this computer is a silly speed of slow), but we have been gorging on tropical frit salad for breakfast since we arrived in peru. Heres one of the funkier looking one´s we´ve come across... Peruvians seem to be psyched on making grains puff up, and sometimes they go as far as dying them shocking colours of artificiality. These ones reminded me of fruit polos, and got me round to wondering if they still make them...?

I´m just about to run out of patience entirely, but before I go I HAVE to talk about the most incredible fish stew we ate last weekend. I can´t describe how incredible the stock was- Ive never even dremed of such good fish stock. We live a block away from the best fish restaurant Ive ever been to- and this stew (as well of being of the best stock EVER), had lots of big chunks of fish, octopus, calamares, and other unidentifiable but really tasty seafoody things. Oh, and to top it off, it was served in a washing up bowl-sized bowl. Might have to go back for more tomorrow- maybe it can become a sunday lunch ritual. Heaven.

Shame I´m such a messy eater though!

tut tut tut steve...

Guilty, AGAIN! Guilty of letting time slip by unblogged. So a catch up...

So, during our time in Urubamba (where Lucy left it) we met an absolutely sound guy who had just started up a Sushi cafe. He was a Peruvian documentary film maker and so between us we had loads to talk about. He had studied in Mexico city and he wanted to get some kind of film course set up in Peru where apparently there are currently no courses. They made AMAZING food in the cafe (the best salads in Peru!) and they were sorting out a studio for artist residencies which is pretty exciting. So we might go back in that direction around Feb to make a film.

Skip a week of walking about in the sacred valley..sorry.. and we are sat on a kirb in a horribly tourist ruined town, waiting for a bus to the selva (farming region at edge of jungle). Our bus pulls up packed, driver not even thinking about letting us squash on. We make a sudden decision on whim to go 8hrs in the opposite direction and head to Puno instead. Puno is a city on the edge of lake Titicaca, apparently the highest navigable lake in the world. On the bus we got to watch Avitar and though it wasn´t quite the same in black and white with subtitles, it was still pretty good. Once there we found our way to some cheap digs where we met a hillarious french couple Colin and Tiff who we hit it off with straight away. We went to visit the last floating of 5 english built gun ships which were incredibally hauled up to the lake (3800m ish) in a million pieces taking mules and locals 6 years in around 1880. Once they were assembled by a team of scoucers they were used instead for moving cargo about, fueled by Llama poo.

A few days later we crammed into another colectivo out to a peninsular on the MASsIVE lake. It actually felt more like a really calm sea than a lake as the water met with the hoizon and it was lined with sandy beaches. We stayed with a lady who had a house on the shore which was really nice, I think she might have kicked a few people out for the night to make room for us but it seems to be a tourist trade out there so they would have been happy for the business. The lady was pretty keen on showing us the local dress style which was big hats with multi colored bobbles with black dresses stitched with multi coloured patterns. I did a bit of knitting with her. Then were picked up by her brothers boat and we were taken to the islands. We played lots of cards with the french and had some good competition. We climbed the hills on the islands which were beautiful, covered in terraces for the agriculture.

The coca museum
We´ve been drinking tea with coca leaves since we´ve been here but now I know some history and medical properties i´m psyched! Ive got a load of leaves stuck in my mouth right now and they make you feel funny. Loads of uses and can used to cure loads of things. They contain 14 alkalines, one of which is cocane which is sadly extracted for the punters in village pubs of Albrighton.

In the markets here they have all sorts of strange things. In some juices they drop in a live frog (apparently, not actually seen) and we saw what we understood to be dried out llama and fox fetuses the other day, not sure what they would be for but they were on a stand that sold fresh herbs... maybe some kind of garnish?..

Frogs on the line

Some fine views from hotel rooms (the overdue beginning of a photo series)



So now we are in Arequipa and we have been here about 10 days. Of course lots has happened but my fingers are aching and I already can´t remember some of it so I will very quickly bring you up to date. First impressions of Arequipa were that we were stuck in the middle of just another big noisy city, but after some time here it doesn´t seem so bad. The weather is perfect every day, the archetecture in the center is pretty nice, everthing colonial built out of the local white stone. After some trawling around the city we have a great studio appartment. It´s between Lucy´s work and the center (10mins walk to each) on a quiet street; It´s really light with great views of the mountains, amazing in the evening light; fully furnished with a new kitchen and bathroom and it has all the movie channels. Market just over the river, supermarket just up the road. Sweet!

I met an Israeli called Guy who wanted to treck up El Misti, the 5800m volcano which towers over the town. We printed off maps, took advise from trip reports on the internet and set off with about 18kilos of food, water and camping stuff each on our backs. You can take a 4x4 from the city to the beginning of the trail but we decided to just jump in a colectivo for 50c and walk an extra 8k. It turned out to be a good decision as after about a kilometer we were picked up by a 4x4 on it´s way to pick some people up and taken up the dust road for a doller. He was picking up an ozzy surfer type guy who had spent a night being sick at the base camp and not made it any further. We got to base camp at 4800m´s in after 4 hours where we met a group of four french/spanish people. It was steep all the way and the sand and rocks made it much harder as it was one step forward half a step slipping backward. I was feeling the altitude also so it was getting hard to take breath. I slept badly before the alarm went off at 3am. We then set off with the bare minimum for the top, the moon lighting the way. We were hoping to get there for the sunrise but we underestimated how hard it would be. So to cut it short we made it up there at about 8 and the views were incredable. The crater was steaming, you could have spent a week up there just looking at everything.

So that was yesterday, so we are more or less up to date. Next thing to do is find a spanish class and let my legs recover from all the downhill.

Steve out.

Ruining it in the Sacred Valley

Hello hello! Im going to try to bring this blog up to date a bit before I forget whats been occuring.

We arrived in Cusco about 10 days ago, and had planned to spend a night and get out as we´d heard it was teaming with tourists and we´d been enjoying it in the almost tourist-free places we´d been so far...but Cusco is actually lovely- a beautiful colonial city build on a sacred inca city which was originally planned out and built in the shape of a puma- not that you can see it now, as the majority of the inca temples were pulled down to build cathedrals- although not all as you will see in some pictures of the Sacsayhuaman ruins above the city (the pumas head), which now stand alongside a gigantic christ that looks down on the city.


the bithday boys and a pan piper called george.

So we spent a couple of days in cusco, ate LOTS of food as there are veggie options galore there, then headed off to do a few days volunteering in a hare krishna yoga retreat in the scared valley. the term volunteering shouldnt be taken too seriously, as most of the time there was only me and steve there chilling out and the guy who ran it wasnt very demanding with the workload he gave us to say the least. So that was lush.

(retreating)

From there we headed to a nearby town in the valley called Pisac- climbed a massive girt hill to visit some inca ruins- cant remember the name but muy spectacular indeed.

(checking out the lack of pointing)

Then we went back to cusco thinking we´d get some more camping stuff together and go do a machu picchu trek. but after umming and ahhing about it, we decided we really couldnt face the touristyness of it, and have decided to boycott the expensive trailaround we expect it to be.

So came out to another town in the sacred valley yesterday and did a hike to Moray- an amazing inca site nearby which was used many many moons ago as a microclimate in which to tame wild species of veg into horticulturable ones. cant think right now what the proper name for this is, but look at the pics and you might get the gist. got a bit lost getting there so hooked up with a sheep/cow/donkey herder named Juaquin and did some herding.

Moray

Planning on a couple more ruiney things in the valley, which gets greener the further we travel up it, and then up into the jungle for a few days to get eaten by insects. Will report back on how that goes. Encountered a hellish big spider today- I guess theres more of that to come.

Must try to break this diary style narrative.