Food fight
We arrived in Arequipa yesterday afternoon, a city which may or may not be the second biggest in Peru, depending on who you listen to. It is surrounded by a string of volcanoes, none of which we could see when we arrived because it was uncharacteristically cloudy.
Dinner was spent in a Peruvian resturant, where I opted for a very nice alpacca steak (sort of llama) and someone else ordered Cuy. If you remember, cuy is gunnea pig and other than a few that we had seen so far revolving on sticks in the streets of Quito, this was the first we had actually seen on a plate. With chips.
The first word that springs to mind when seeing a stone roasted gunnea pig on a plate surrounded with chips and a salad garnish, is "roadkill". For a start, it was flat. Secondly, it was grinning, it's still in tact head exposing it's tiny little teeth at whoever it was facing. What's more, all four legs, claws and all, were largely in tact too, splayed from each "corner" of the beast. It actually looked like it had jumped out of a plane, and thought it was still skydiving downwards, adopting as it was a classic skydiving pose.
I tasted a bit for arguments sake (I wasn't going to order an entire thing) and now have suspicions about KFC's chicken.

Today we have the day to ourselves, so spent it checking out the local sights. First off was a vast Monastary (for nuns, remember) which had remained off limits for hundreds of years until new sanitary provisions required it to be opened to the public so that it could afford plumbing. The place is huge, a colonial town to itself covering about two hectares. The walls are painted in vivid reds and blues, with splashes of additional colours from the flowerbeds in every street and cloister.
The history of the place is quite fun too. Originally it sounded like something out of a Ken Russell movie, with the nuns generally doing things that nuns shouldn't do, until the vatican sent a diciplinarian over to straighten things out. A beautiful looking place, expect a few reels of photos to be bored with.

Following that, we dropped in to visit Arequipa's most famous resident, a five hundred or so year old mummy named Juanita, who was discovered burried in the ice around a nearby volcanoe in 1995. She remains disconcertinly well preserved, with a distinctive face, hair and skin and flesh on her arms. Apparently her internal organs are also still intact, but (mercifully?) we weren't shown this. Aged only about twelve when she died, she was apparently sacrificed to become one with the mountain god, and given that said mountain hasn't errupted since, perhaps it worked.

Just had lunch at a nearby cafe, one of many on the main square of the town. Curiously, each cafe sends its waitresses out into the street to hagggle for customers. Once we had picked a place, the waitresses were fighting over each other to serve us. Not sure if this was disturbing or flattering.

Next stop, Inca trail. Via a few triffles such as condor spotting of course...
- posted by Vince @ 2:23 PM