Arequipa - Volcanoes, Earthquakes and Spicy Food

How do you capture Arequipa?

It´s a city surrounded by not one, not two, but three 20,000 foot volcanoes.  One is active.  Two used to be not too long ago.

Inca´s used to sacrifice children on the volcanoes (really!)  Climbers stumbled across the mummified, frozen bodies a few decades ago.

There are earthquakes every few decades.

The food is spicy and delicious.

The city`s major industries are alpaca products, cement made from volcanic ash, and tourism of canyons and mountains.

We don´t have anything comparable in the States.  Imagine food from New Orleans on top of the Grand Canyon, with Mount McKinley in the background.  Crazy place.

Peru consistently delivers on quality restaurants and good design (in the tourist quarters, at least...)

How about some Japanese / Peruvian fusion?

Cool architecture and design everywhere.

Colonial living.

Even the stray dogs seem less threatening here.

More historical architecture...

...with some vultures thrown in!

Found it!  I took Starbucks for granted... I will never make that mistake again.

AC, high speed internet, caffeine and spotless bathrooms.  Heaven.

These folks would have gone to Starbucks.  An old colonial mansion, then the residence of the British Ambassador.

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Also the private house of a Spanish merchant.  Doing deals the old school way.

A not-so-PC depiction of the natives from some very old maps.

Cusco, back in the day.  

Street life in Arequipa - families come and hang out in the Plaza del Armas.

Hustle and bustle.  

There must be hundreds of pigeons in the main square.

Kids love pigeons.

Massive, massive volcanoes behind the city.

Spain´s contribution to the skyline.

For some reason these taxis cracked me up.

Hectic.  The most unpredictable and fluid traffic I´ve seen so far.  Drive at your own risk!

City streets.

Canyons and Condors

Well, you can´t  go wrong watching the world´s biggest birds in one of the world´s deepest canyons.

Another amazing spot.

Birds the size of small planes in a canyon twice as deep as the Grand Canyon.  Almost 2 miles from top to bottom.

Two thumbs up for Colca Canyon, about a 4 hour drive from Arequipa.

Vicuñas, the gazelle of the Altiplano.

They´re a protected species, but locals are allowed to capture them and shear their coats, since the wool is worth a lot.

More llamas at high altitude.

The skyline - the only range higher than this is the Himalayas.

Effective marketing.

Alpacas that haven´t had their coats cut in a long time.  They look... ridiculous.

Mop on 4 legs.

This dog got frisky with the llamas, and the llamas weren´t pleased.

Colca Lodge - a wonderfully peaceful retreat at the base of Colca Valley.  

Elegant architecture and thoughtful use of color.

Quinoa - it´s the local grain that thrives at high altitude.  It´s becoming popular in the US for Whole Foods types because it has a lot of protein and is gluten free.

Colca Canyon and Valley

Literally hundreds of stories of terracing.  Unbelievable.

Facing towards the sunrise.

Entering the Canyon.  You can see a jeep in the bottom right.

Bottomless Colca Canyon, at the Condor Cross.

First sighting - long distance.

Closer.  These birds have wingspans of up to 11 feet.

Buzzing the crowd.

These birds are amazing. They sort of float by like small planes.

It´s hard to capture the space... this canyon is over 10,000 feet deep.  You can sense some of it here.

20,000 foot peaks in the background.

Majestic from far away, ugly ugly up close.

Getting tea at a shop that could double as a petting zoo.  There were chickens, llamas, cats and sheep there.  And they would wander in and out of the kitchen and seating area as they pleased.  Imagine a Starbucks with llamas in the mountains.

Getting a little more rugged...

The public restrooms on the way back!

Pre-Industrial Industry

You don´t need to visit museums to see how people used to live.

You can come visit this salt production ¨facility¨ in Peru.

Salty spring water is fed through a series of channels to basis, where it evaporates.  People then shovel the salt into sacks, carry them off, and market the product to the wider world.

It is incredibly labor intensive, and cannot be lucrative once you realize that a pound of table salt costs less than a dollar.  The raw version must fetch much, much less.  At this point, the money generated by tourism probably beats the revenues from the actual salt (an entrance ticket costs a $1.75).

Other than the Europeans taking pictures, this system probably hasn´t changed in thousands of years.  Wow.

Welcome to a three dimensional maze of thousands of salt basins.

Salt water starts out in the canal by those tourists. Then, by using rocks to block a series of channels, it is directed into the pools.  It takes about a month for the water to evaporate, at which point the salt is extracted.

Each basin produces a few hundred pounds of salt per year.

Making the hard uphill trek.

Surreal.



Probably relatively more accessible when you walked everywhere.  It´s a precarious road to the mines.



The textures really come out in black and white.

Shadows on the salt.

A natural adjacency to salt.  So.  Much. Stuff.