Cuy in Colca Canyon

Hello hello, and welcome my new blog friends! I get so excited whenever someone new signs up as a follower. It makes me feel so popluar! :)

So first, I´d like to say that I´m just happy to be here writing to you today. The overnight bus ride from Lima to Arequipa was, how do I say this nicely...fucking scary! (Pardon my Japanese, as Colin once said when he was little). You would have laughed if you could have seen my face. I don´t even do roller coasters because I´m such a control freak, so from midnight to 5am (when the road finally improved) I basically cursed the driver under my breath and prayed the Our Father...I´m not kidding. Let me paint a picture for you...the bus is pitch black...I´m in the isle seat in the second row (on the right, for those of you that are really visually oriented). This prime location is just close enough to the front that I can hear the latin music the driver is blasting in his cabin, and can see the blinding headlights of every truck, before they blow past us and shake the bus. And I could handle that! What I couldn´t handle was the speed inwhich the driver insisted on taking 45 degree turns right and left as we charged full speed down mountains. There was a turn every 30 seconds, accompanied by more g-force than your typical dangerous fair ride.

The only positive thing that may have come out of the experience is the ab workout I got from trying to stay in my seat, and the first 3/4 of the movie August Rush (that came on during breakfast). I have to admit, I liked it! I´m a hopeless romantic, come on, let a scared girl have her fun! Best part of this story: everyone else was asleep on the bus, except my friend who bruised his tale bone the day before and a couple girls that got sick. Sorry for the elaborate recount, but I had to make sure that at least someone would get a chuckle out of my suffering.

So...we arrived in Arequipa at 9am in the morning. It was so nice to be in a beautiful city where the poverty didn´t depress you and make you feel unsafe. I spent the morning eating and running errands with my friend Natasha, and then we checked out the Santa Catalina Monastery. The monastery was founded in 1579 by Doña María de GuzmánSaint, and named
after Catherine of Siena (note: my confirmation name is Catherine after this very saint). They have a really nice website, which you can check out if you´re interested, but some of the things I found interesting during the tour were that the nuns came to the monastery as early as 6 years old, and had to decide after 4 years if they were going to dedicate their lives to the monastery or return home. The decision, however, was usually not theirs, but their family´s - and in that time it was very prestigious to have a nun or priest in the clan. But don´t feel too badly for the sisters. They were from the richest families and came to the convent with their servants and expensive china. At one time there were as many as 500 women living on the grounds (175 of which were nuns). Today, the monastery is home to 24 nuns. The grounds are beautiful with bold blue, white and orange walls, and bright red flowers.

At night I tried Alpaca meat for the first time...niiiiice! And tonight, we are going to prepare and have dinner with a local family, where I´ll be eating ¨cuy¨, which is the spanish word for Guinea Pig. Yeah! I just hope they´re dead when we get there. Our guide mentioned something about ¨you can pick yours out...¨. Um, there will be no selecting my meal if it´s playing with it´s friends when I arrive! Please just do the dirty work for me and I´ll pretend it´s chicken!

Last thing worth mentioning is the trip we took today from Arequipa to the city of Chivay/Colca Canyon (about 4 hours away). We climbed to an elevation of 4,900 meters (which is over 16,000 ft or about half way up Mt Everst). We had to keep really hydrated and chew on coca leaves and drink coca tea to help regulate our bodies and resist altitude sickness (which can be really hard on the head and stomach!). The tea wasn´t bad with mint and sugar, but chewing the leaves with a bit of ash to activate the juices was ummmm, not something I´d do for fun otherwise. :) In addition to our lightheadedness, as we climbed the mountains we had great vistas of the volcanoes and mountains, and drive through a national reserve where we saw lama, alpaca, guanaco, and vicuna (all part of the lama family). Tomorrow we will go further south into the canyon, and hopefully I´ll be able to report a Andean Condor or Puma sighting! Keep your fingers crossed for us! :)