Arequipa

South America Day 6

Arequipa

We arrived in Arequipa mid morning. We dropped our gear in the hotel and went out to explore the "White City". The call it the White city because of the volcanic material they use in the render giving the buildings the bright white appearance.

The main square "Plaza de Armas" is the cultural centre of the city. It was becoming apparent that every city in Peru had a Plaza de Armas and a San Francisco church.

Arequipa is a fairly wealthy city that's well looked after and quite clean. I never felt under threat like I did in Lima to the point that I was fairly relaxed. The only problem (as is the case for all Peruvian cities) is the incessant beeping of the taxis trying to get your business. It's very annoying.
Of all the cities we visited west of the continental divide, Arequipa is my favourite city.

Monasterio de Santa Catalina

We were a little tired from the bus trip but we figured we would go exploring anyway. Our trusty Lonely Planet guide had a number of suggestions. The one that sparked the most interest was the Monasterio de Santa Catalina.
It's an active convent with around 20 nuns still living there. Their area is closed off to the public but the rest is open. It's a very colourful place and very pleasant. It's like a city within the city of Arequipa. High walls protect it from the outside world making it a peaceful place (well it would be without all of us annoying tourists.

 

The Monasterio de Santa Catalina is made up of a number of features including many beautiful cloisters (or court yards). The one above is called the Orange Tree Cloister.

 

There is also Novices Cloister (above).

The Great Cloister (above).

This is the Silent Patio.

The convent even has streets & squares like those in the surrounding city. This one is called Zocodober Square. It has a nice little fountain with fish in it.

 

 

Here's one of the many streets in the convent. You can see one of the inactive volcanoes that surround the city of Arequipa. The volcano is called Chachani.

The convent wasn't all pretty coloured buildings, there were also some almost disturbing exhibits like this one of the last supper.

Throughout the convent there were rooms like this that are/were nun's living quarters. They're very basic accommodations and don't even electricity or gas.

The Nun's even today use these clay ovens to cook. Interesting egg shape.

 

The nuns have abandoned this now, but this old clay jar laundry was in use when there was no modern pressure water pipes. The centre channel feeds each of the individual tubs. I can't recall what fed the channel.

 

This orchard was out of bounds, I assume because it's still part of the active section. It's yet another peaceful corner. I can't tell you what the significance of the clay jars is. To me it's just a place for snakes & mosquitoes to hang out.

 

I can't even remember where in the convent we were, but the room was dark except for a skylight. Great opportunity to take a bit of a silly shot. Anyone recall the video for a Queen song? Boheimian Rapsity?

  

Kerri couldn't help but get up on her soap box.

 

Kerri was in the confession box for ages! Can't imagine why. We left the convent and headed back to the Plaza de Armas for lunch.

Plaza de Armas

 

We must have spent a good 2-3 hours in the convent & by the time we surfaced it was lunch o'clock. The Plaza de Armas has a few different functions. The centre square is a garden/park area with nice plants, fountains and park benches. Around the outside are a collection of shops and restaurants around 3 sides and a great Cathedral along the 4th.

The lower level of the shop buildings (above) range from dodgy little trinket shops selling everything from fridge magnets to t-shirts, to jewelry shops and high end clothing shops specializing in baby alpaca clothing.

 

The top level is reserved pretty much exclusively for restaurants. Each restaurant has an aggressive hustler at street level to entice you upstairs. Somehow we picked one and had a nice lunch. As you can see from this picture, the individual restaurants aren't segregated. There are no less than 6 different restaurants in shot and another 3 or 4 behind the camera. If it wasn't for the tourist dollar there's no doubt that they wouldn't exist. By the same token, they do try very hard to make sure that the tourists don't get sick and take care to wash fresh produce in filters water instead of the bacteria laden tap water in Peru.

We had a nice view of the Plaza de Armas from our lunch table. The gardens are very well laid out and well looked after. The centre of attention is the fountain in the middle. Such a pleasant place to just chill out.

So much focus of the South Americans is directed toward religion. Something like 80-90% of them are devout Catholics so every place we went seemed to have a Cathedral of some description. Arequipa's Cathedral is pretty impressive.

 

The city of Arequipa is shadowed by three volcanoes. This one is El Misti. It looks to be the most recently active one of the 3. They are all supposedly inactive, but there are daily tremors (apparently but not while we were there). There are a couple of active volcanoes near by so seismic activity isn't particularly surprising.

 

Not long after I took the previous shot from the balcony of our hotel I took an afternoon nap to partially make up for the lack of sleep on the night bus. The change in altitude was hard work and even walking up stairs ended in heavy gasping. I thought after living at 1200m for the previous 18 months we would have coped a little better, but it was quite noticeable.
After my hour nap, I looked out at El Misti again and this is what I saw! It was such a bizarre band of cloud. I'll let the photo talk now.

Ice Princess

 

During the afternoon we ticked off another mark on our "To Do in Arequipa" list. We visited the museum of the Ice Princess, Juanita. She was found only a few years ago in the crater of a near by inactive volcano, Ampato.
The story of the discovery goes along the lines of the neighboring active volcano (Sabancaya) blew it's top and showered Ampato with hot ash, melting it's ice bound top. Juanita was dislodged & rolled down into the crater. She was discovered a couple of days later still mostly frozen.
The story of the reason she was there, in short, is that she was a sacrifice to the angry gods to stop the volcanic activity. She was a daughter of the royalty of the time so it must have been serious. She was given heavy sedatives and clubbed on the side of the head killing her instantly. She would have been sacrificed willingly believing she would be moving on to a greater place.
She and three other mummies, found subsequently on Ampato, are kept in glass freezers, like Juanita in shot, to preserve them. Remember that they haven't been embalmed or prepared in any way, they've just been sitting buried in ice and snow for hundreds of years at the top of a mountain. They rotate the one on display so we were lucky to see the most important of the four.
The museum doesn't allow photography inside so I had to pinch these ones from the net. They had a stack of other cool artifacts in the museum other than the body of Juanita. There were some tiny silver vicuna statues that had holes in them. Apparently they were at the very top of the volcano and got zapped by lightning on more than one occasion.