Arequipa

I feel like I start my blogs off the same way every time stating that I meant to post this a long time ago but it didn't happen... Two weekends ago (February 8-10) A group of us (9) flew to Arequipa and took a bus tour to Colca Valley. Our teacher, Marta, was supposed to go with us but she received food poisoning and wasn't able to go. So it was just us students, thank goodness we had our secret weapon, Maria. Maria is from UNK and studying with us but she is originally from Mexico so she is fluent. We had to wake up at 2am to get to the airport on time, and our flight out was at 6am. We arrived in Arequipa at 8am and on the plane instead of peanuts we received a box with our breakfast! It was great, we got the typical cup of juice, small ham sandwich, and a slice of cake. From the airport our guide picked us up and there were 17 of us on the trip. Our guide spoke English for us, but it was nice to hear both the Spanish and English to help with our listening skills. Almost right away the Nebraskans fell asleep and we felt bad that our guide was talking, but we were so tired. We drove into Colca Valley and our destination was the town of Chivay. We made several stops along the way, and the scenery was beautiful! We could not take a bad picture. Our guide was teaching us things about the valley and the differences between llamas and alpacas.

As we got higher in altitude we were getting a little sick from the altitude. At one of our stops they served coca tea, apparently coca is supposed to help with the altitude. Our cup of tea was hot water with coca leaves and other herbs in it, it tasted like green tea and I thought it was pretty good! Others weren't huge fans of it but since I was feeling a little sick I was finishing other peoples teas. They also sold coca candy so we were all eating candy hoping it would work, I'm not sure if it just made us "high" or actually helped... At the highest point we ended up going to the bathroom, but the bathroom hut was a small hike up the hill. Some of us got out of the bus and our first obstacle was to jump over a ditch, which is easy enough but doing it at a high altitude about knocked us on our butts. The guys in our group were helping us across though, such gentleman they are. And once we all reached the huts (AKA the bathrooms) we had to sit on rocks to recover. While sitting on the rock it started to snow, then I looked over and realized there was no door to the hut and not toilet... at least the floor was 2x4s and they just cut a hole in the floor and that was the bathroom. Once we got back to the bus we all passed out until we arrived in Chivay. We were very thankful that the altitude was much lower there so we could recover. Once there we ate lunch and the driver dropped us off at our hostel. I think we were most excited for the cooler weather, it was about 60 degrees, perfect weather for Nebraskans! (Is Nebraskans even a word...?) anyways for lunch we had a buffet and I tried alpaca. It was very chewy and salty, but I would eat some again. After lunch we changed and went to a hot spring. It was interesting because they pumped the water into a pool, but it was worth it. Very relaxing!

Later that night we went to supper in Chivay and the restaurant had a live band, during every song there were two dancers and they would dress up in different outfits for each song.  The next morning we had to be ready at 6:30 and my room woke up to Lanisa knocking on our door at 6:20... whoops! But of course that would be my room, I got dressed really fast and ran downstairs because we had complimentary breakfast and I couldn't miss that! Once on the bus we drove to Condor Cross. The morning was beautiful, cool and we could not take a bad picture. But as we kept climbing it got cloudier and cloudier and once we got to Condor Cross, all we could see was fog... 

 Most of our group

Can you see the condors?! ...Ya we couldn't either.

I ended up buying some alpaca gloves from some vendors for 7 soles, since there wasn't much else to do. It didn't take long though once we left the observation area to get out of the clouds, and at our next stop it was clear. Our guide was telling us some more history of of the valley and how we need to preserve it. Then all of the sudden a Condor flew by us!! Our guide said we were really lucky because most of the condors go to the Pacific during the rainy season for more food. So we were very excited to see one!

Condor! The biggest bird on earth...even though it looks fairly small here.

After we saw the Condor we were content and went on our way, we stopped in Chivay for lunch and had a little bit of time to look in the markets, then we were on our way back to Arequipa. We all slept the entire way back to Arequipa and when we got there it was raining!! And not just a sprinkle it was raining pretty good! We were very excited for some more weather change, since it never changes in Lima. But then one of the girls had 14 missed calls from people, her host mom thought she had died. We thought this was a very strange assumption, then we learned that a couple hours before we got to town people had died from the rain! Apparently part of a road collapsed and people fell in. They had never received that much rain in one amount of time before and the streets were apparently acting like waterfalls. I'm glad we missed it. Our hostel in Arequipa was really nice and 33 soles a night per person and we had 3 person rooms with our own bathroom and TV. They had a big kitchen so to save money we decided to go to the grocery store and buy some food. We bought three boxes of mac&cheese, bread, sliced chicken, mayonnaise, fruit and 2 bottles of Rum and Coke once we divided the cost it was only 14 soles a person! After eating we decided to go to the discos (bars) in Arequipa because a lot of people said we had to go out while in Arequipa. We had really fun! And we were glad we could sleep in finally the next day. On Sunday we checked out at 11am and walked around town to the shops and ate at a pizzeria then returned to the hotel because they had taxis for us at 4 to take us to the airport. They have some really good chocolates from Arequipa so we bought some in the airport and it was my Valentine's present to myself. The chocolates were really good! We got back to Lima safe and sound after an interesting plane ride back and once I got back home I went right to bed.