Happy New Year!

After spending the days following Christmas chilling by a pool in a blistering hot, sunhine-filled desert of dali´s dreams (it was fine, how was the rest of your December?), we headed up to Lima one last time. We met up with Jamie and one of her friends, again, as well as Geoff (a friend of Stew´s from Peru). G Money, as he is better known, is in Peru visiting his girlfriend´s family, so we all went out for drinks together, which was a nice little reunion.

The next day, we hit the long dusty road again on our way to Arequipa in southern Peru. It is a beautiful colonial town and pretty much every building is made from giant white stones so that the city looks like a conglomeration of mini fortresses. We spent New Year´s Eve in Arequipa watching a hilarious cover band sing a mix of American classic rock and high school dance hits (as well as some Offspring). At midnight, we found ourselves in the top story of a disco (called the ¨couch bar¨) with a 360 degree view of the top of the city. We could see the main fireworks display over the Plaza de Armas, but there were also about 200 smaller displays scattered throughough the city. Not a bad way to spend welcome the new year. On our way home, we ate choripan (chorizo on bread with french fries), which was delicious.

We spent the next day recovering and wandering around the city. The choripans seemed to be a bad idea and we were glad to have an extra day to rest. That night (or the morning depending on your sleep schedule), we left at 3 a.m. for a hiking trip through Colca Canyon.

Colca Canyon is the second deepest in the world at just over 4,000 meters. It is more than twice as deep as the Grand Canyon. We drove for a couple of hours over mountains and through deserts (the only natural resources appear to be stones) until we came to a little town called Chivay, where we grabbed lunch (coca pancakes and banana dumplings) before heading up to Cruz del Condor. Here, we watched condors swoosh and dive and hunt for dead animals, as they are known to do (like Stew).

After an hour of condor watching, we ate some alpaca before beginning our alpaca-like journey into the canyon. The hike began flat as we left town but soon descended dramatically into the canyon. Though the hike was only a couple of miles, at least one was vertical. Several hours later, we arrived at a little village called San Juan de Chukchuk (spelling is unclear...meaning is Saint Juan of the Plagued because the town was plagued by malaria in recent times). We were exhausted and relieved to find comfortable beds waiting in our straw roofed, mud walled hut.

The next morning, we had an easy day. Just four hours of hiking and only a mini mountain to climb. Unlike the previous day, we didn´t scale either of the canyon walls, but went over and down a small rise in the canyon itself. Actually, it was still a pretty intense hike. We got to our lodge around noon or one in the afternoon and were delighted that, due to a natural spring in the mountain, we had a swimming pool to relax in all afternoon. This was great because we were hot, tired, and smelled bad (even for us). Dinner was nice: huge plates of spaghetti. Stew, however, could not become full no matter how much pasta he ate.

The next morning we had an early wake up call (again!) and were on the trail before the sun was fully up at 5. This turned out to be necessary because the hike out of the canyon was steep, rocky, long, and would very quickly have become miserably hot. We were told the hike took between 3 and 4 hours, but we were alotted 5. The first person in our group finished in 2:12, two semi-sane germans (including a 68 year old that thought it was normal to get out of a swimming pool, pull off his speedo and stand in front of everyone changing) finished in 2:30, and we finished just around 3 hours. By 8 a.m., we were very tired and the sun was incredibly hot. Just a minute or so after Tori came up, a group of five condors flew over head and stayed close by long enough to snap some photos. !que suerte! We still had a 30 minute hike back to town, but at least it was flat. Honestly, distance no longer seems to be difficult which compared to the steepness of Colca.

After our Colca tour, we spent one night more in Arequipa. Yesterday morning we got on a 5 hours bus to Tacna (near the CHilean border) that took 8 hours. Two taxi rides later, we were in Arica, Chile. Because we will be meeting Stew´s parents in a few days, we hurried on past Arica and caught an overnight bus to San Pedro de Atacama in the heart of the desert near the Bolivian and Argentinian borders. We just arrived and found that everything in Chile is really really expensive. Hence, we will be camping in the Atacama desert for the next two nights before we catch a bus down to Santiago, where we will finally meet up with Stew´s parents! Yay!