Arequipa

From Nazca it was an 8 hour overnight bus journey to get us to the city of Arequipa. This was the first of 3 similar trips on Peruvian coaches and I have to say I was impressed. The seats were comfortable, spacious, had good reclining and footrests so laying down for a sleep was easy. The sir con on the last bus was a bit dodgy, but other than that, good.

I had the feeling I was being followed...

Arequipa is another city, so not my favorite setting. It's the second largest city in Peru, and is over 2000m above sea level. There were some volcanoes around the city which were quite impressive, and the usual plethora of churches and posh government buildings.

Being around Christmas, there were lots of trees decorated and nativity scenes.  I quite liked this one made from straw!

While in the city we also had our first proper encounter with Alpacas (below). We assumed they were llamas (the ll is pronounced y in Spanish, so 'yamas'), but were corrected and shown how to distinguish between the two camelids.

There were many craft shops all over Peru selling alpaca wool clothing, many claiming to be '100% baby alpaca'. We were warned that some of these may well be 'maybe alpaca' instead!

Alpaca

Llama

When we left Arequipa for Colca Canyon we were also introduced to a third, much rarer, smaller and prettier camelid, the vicuna. These are far less numerous than either alpaca or llama, roam in the wild, and have a much finer wool (which can only be sheared every 3 years). Vicuna clothing sells for ridiculous prices ($1800 for a scarf) and comes with official certificates of authenticity.

In contrast to the lovely vicuna, we also saw the Yura cement factory on the road to Colca, and it looked like something out of Mad Max. It also meant that there were many very slow moving lorries on the twisty windy road, which the journey rather slow.

At the highest point on the road, we had yet more views of volcanoes, at one point we could see 7 at once, one of them intermittently belching smoke. We were very high by this stage, another 1000 meters or so higher than Arequipa, and we were all starting to feel the altitude.

To combat the altitude, I had purchased myself a small bag of coca leaves. You basically roll them up and suck a few of them for 10 - 15 minutes (with a chunk of chalk-like sugar as a catalyst for extracting the cocaine) and it makes you feel better. It certainly makes your mouth a bit numb, but I think it did help give me a bit of a boost to combat the altitude, and I used them a few times, particularly on day two of the Inca Trail.