Arequipa mini-break

`Lima-Arequipa-Cuzco?.`Swinging our backpacks onto the nearest bench in Tacna bus station just over the Chile-Peru border, we shook our heads no. `Lima-Arequipa-Cuzco?` one hopeful tout after another continued to chorus to the same response as we got our bearings, went to change our pesos for soles and bought water. And we smiled, glancing around the bustling terminal where ragtag bus concessions lined two floors, women in wide brimmed hats sat amidst piles of luggage bundled in sturdy colourful blanets and rugs, and ruddy-faced kids tottered and crawled around in woolen trousers, bellowing at their siblings. Almost two months after leaving India, it felt a little like a homecoming. Except that in Peru, it seemed, bus and taxi agents moved on smilingly after your shake of the head, gesturing to their offices in case you changed your mind. Whereas in India, of course, a sizeable semi-circle of salesmen, touts and curious onlookers forms around you as the various options at your disposal are repeated at regular intervals and everyone stares on in puzzled curiosity to see what inexplicable thing the strange foreigners might do at any moment.

Plaza de Armas, Arequipa

We had intended to visit Arica, the Chilean seaside border town, for a day or two of beach life before entering Peru. But over a greasy spoon breakfast straight off our night bus we looked to the cheap taxi options outside and shrugged at one another. We still had about a week until the Inca Trail begun but, with more altitude acclimatisation to do beforehand (even despite San Pedro`s 2400 metres) we were slightly wary of running into rainy season bus problems on the Peruvian side. So why not?

Beetles. Incongruously everywhere in Arequipa.

4000 Chilean pesos buys you a speedy two hour shared taxi ride over the border, with the driver shepherding you through the formalities, to Tacna, where we could spend a night or two instead. The drive was quick and the scenery continued much as it had in Chile, exposing - as ever - the fiction of border demarcation. In Tacna bus station, considering the 6-7 hours to Arequipa, Perus`s second city, and our quick progress so far, we again looked at each other and shrugged. And so it was that by 4pm, we were pulling into an overcast, late afternoon Arequipa bus station - an unplanned but painless 18 hours, three buses and one cab ride after our departure from the Atacama. Against usual practice (and rusty after the European smoothness of the South) we let a mumsy tout guide us to a reasonably cheap hostel 10 minutes walk from the centre. It really wasn`t that cheap and we could have been much more central. But it was fine for the price and it led us to Mario and the cheery  ragbag Yunta Wasi hostel. Mario and his teenage daughter (delightful to us but switching, as 16 year olds do, to surly and expasparated whenever her father was in the room) were over from Lima to look after the place while his brother was away. A welcoming, absent-minded and eccentric fellow, Mario was given to entertaining monologues and struggled against his better bohemian nature to maintain some kind of handle on his brother`s business while the hostel, somewhat like an orphanage run by a teenage boy, bumbled on around him. He needed a woman here, he sighed in confusion to T one morning; `It`s a lot of work`. Asking where we should put our food supplies as we entered a chaotic kitchen to greet the daughter, an incomprehensible Argentian hippy from El Chalten and a Peruvian motorcyclist, preparing for the nigh`s BBQ, they shrugged cheerfully - anywhere. And there you have it, we thought; Well Toto, I guess we`re not in Chileargentina anymore. 

Streets of Yanahuara, a hilly suburb of the city

Man in a pot. Quite the photo-shoot was had.

We liked Arequipa immediately - and as with any first experience of a new country, it was impossible to tell if that meant we were taking to Peru or developing an affinity with the city itself. Actually it was both and it was only on our return to trek in the nearby Colca Canyon  (I write this back in the White City) that it was clear how much we liked it. Peru´s second city is set beneath the towering El Misti volcano and crammed with convents, churches and old colonial mansions carved from volcanic sillar. It is beautiful without veering anywhere near chocolate box-twee - which Cuzco, for all its gorgeousness, can stuggle with - and has bite without feeling unfriendly or dangerous. It has upmarket sophisticated restaurants housed in old colonial buildings and courtyards, cheap hole-in-the-wall eateries and legions of tiny cave-like bars promising myriad crazy hours lost to Pisco and Arequipeña beer (an offer we were sadly unable to test to its messy conclusion due to a pre-Inca trail detox). It is also a natural gringo-trail stop which rarely feels touristy; always a tough balance to strike. 

The marvellous hats of the Altiplano

`I think there are two kinds of country,`T mused, as we padded the city in the drizzle, adjusting to the cooler climate and the sights and sounds of the Peruvian altiplano,`Those where you go and buy an umbrella from the shop when you need a new one, and those where people approach you on the street selling them at a premium as soon as it start raining.`Paraguas paraguas paraguas,` shouted entrepreneurial old ladies and adolescent boys on the street corners - much as they had in rainy Macleod Ganj five months earlier. The mist enveloped the sturdy low-rise city, obscuring its mountain ranges and whipping puddles around our feet. And as we looked ahead to six weeks in the Andean heartlands, we breathed in a bit deeper and acquired an extra spring in our step even despite the thinning air. However orientalist it sounds, to leave Chile and Argentina - beautiful as they are - for Peru or Bolivia is to feel you are on the cusp of a little more adventure, a little more character and a little more chaos and energy. And however controversial it sounds - and despite the vibrancy of the towns and landscapes we left behind - I think it is also true to say we absorbed more culture in two days of Arequipa than in much of the previous seven weeks. The South simply feels much newer I suppose. Vast wildernesses where semi-nomadic tribes were almost completely wiped out in the colonial encounter; cultures made anew, at least below their northern altiplano expanses where the four countries share much more in common with each other than with their respective capital cities.

But reaching Peru you find a civilisation still comprising some 45% indigenous peoples, while in Bolivia this increases to more than 60%. So while in their Southern neighbours there are still meaningful indigenous roots, despite their decreased visibility and the brutality of periods of internal expansion such as the 19th century Argentine Conquest of the Desert, pre-Columbian history is immediately much more live and present in the northern lands. Languages like Quechua remain widespread and Spanish a learned tongue for many. Peru feels, in fact, rather akin to India for me; a civilisation where conquerers came - with brutality, with plundering, with cultural appropriation - but for all their might were also absorbed into the tapestry. Where destruction and instruction never totally wiped out indigenous lifestyles, even as they claimed lives, but were themselves re-formulated and adapted into new hybrids.

Arequipa cathedral

Peru´s churches, cathedrals and religious art seem to show this vividly, as goldleaf murals depict tropical fruits and birds of paradise in a glorious tangle of colour, form and gesture. The missionary eye on the Amazon basin contributed but the Christian cosmovision also slammed spectacularly into that of the Andean world to fuse together the forms and significance of key shared symbols - from the bird to the cross to the Virgin. There were some attempts to fight this profane semantic intermingling: for example in Potosi, Bolivia the religious art collection of the excellent Casa de Monedo features 18th century paintings where the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are re-imagined as a rather terrifying set of identical Jesus-triplets in a bid to stamp out the Andean symbolism around birds. But as in India, there is a special thrill when you glimpse beautiful churches or Christian artworks, to see the familiar so entirely re-owned. Images and architectures so ingrained in your psyche (and I write as a person as thoroughly secular as it is possible to be) are reabsorbed and digested into forms entirely of their own place and time. Where the Holy Spirit becomes a tropìcal bird and the Virgin is fused forever with the Andean earth godess Pachamama (whose unquenchable thirst was to be assuaged with many a glug of our cerveza or water in the succeeding weeks, spilled on the ground as an offering at the behest of surrounding Peruvias or Bolivians). And where, as in Marcos Zapata`s masterpiece in the eerie space of Cuzco`s cathedral - itself built from plundered stone dragged from the nearby Incan fortress Sacsayhuamán - the Last Supper may well involve roast cuy (guinea pig) and papaya.

Passageways in Santa Catalina convent

So Arequipa amazed us with its embarrasment of cultural riches. Even on our first evening we`d stick our heads around an open church door only to audibly gasp at its dark, stony glamour and haul of gold and silver altarpìeces. The jewel in the city`s crown is undoubtedly the Monastario de Santa Catalina which takes up an intimidating block just north of the Plaza de Armas. A Dominican convent set up in 1579 by a wealthy Spanish widow, Maria de Guzman (its first nun), it has undergone several incarnations and has a rich history, remaining both an active convent and the heart of Arequipa`s UNESCO World Heritage status. A captivating warren of cells, chapels, gallery spaces and communal living areas are linked by shady cobbled streets and beatuiful courtyards. It was, and is, essentially a city within a city and as you walk around you sense the bevy of wealthy young novices (a convent to which only the rich need apply) getting into mischief around every glorious terracotta peach or deep-blue corner. And sacrilege to even cross my bourgeoise mind, I`m sure, but the place is also an Interiors master-class...

I will be moving in shortly

The art museum of the Carmelite Monesterio de Santa Teresa was another highlight - housing just 21 nuns now, as since 1710. We were shown around the galleries open to the public by a charming young guide whose English language services were included in the ticket price for an additional tipping fee (a system commen in the city and which struck us as very sensible and valuable given how easy it is for tourists to be overly tight on these things). The real treasure here, as in the beautiful San Ignacio chapel of the Jesuit Iglesia de la Compañía, is the original painted walls and ceilings. Miraculously spared, if a little worn, by the volcanic eruptions and earthquakes to have wracked the city over the years, the paintings are entirely different to any Christian muralwork I`ve seen before and were quite captivating.

Paintings in the San Ignacio Chapel, Iglesia de la Compañía. No photos allowed, so this is from a postcard.

Santa Teresa convent

Finally, Arequipa is also home, until the museum currently being built in Colca Canyon near her final, brutal resting place of Ampato is complete, to Juanita, the `Ice Princess`. The university-run Museo Santuarios Andinos provides a fantastic half hour video of her discovery plus a student-guided tour around the findings and finally one of the forlorn, huddled little mummies themselves. Juanita, famously and uniquely, is not an actual mummy. The 15th century adolescent girl, believed to have been of noble birth, was found preserved in the ice in the 1990`s in unprecedentedly perfect condition, along with a number of fellow-child sacrifices. The question of Incan human sacrifices is a bit of a sore point, we found later on the Inca Trail, since it was one of the grossly inflated Spanish propaganda points. But as the sensitive and engrossing collection in Arequipa shows, there was nothing particularly bloodthirsty or rash about the practices, as far as these things go. They were the rare, meticulously planned and executed offerings of a sophisticated, hardy and devout people, with the children selected as babies and raised and educated to their envied fate.

One of the aspects which struck me most though - ahead of our journey in their sandaled footsteps a week later - was the sense that, unusually for pre-modern mountain-dwelling peoples, the Incas presumed to ascend to their Gods. That mountains are where the Gods reside, with altitude sickness and the ravages of bitter cold indicating their displeasure at our intrusion, has tended to be the way mountain cultures interpret their cosmology. But this strange Andean civilisation - which, for a mere 100 years expanded far beyond the heartland to rule from Ecuador to central Chile, despite having no horses, no written language and no formal monetary system - climbed thousands of metres into desolate mountainscapes to deliver healthy, noble-born adolescents to their wrathful Gods. Juanita was in her winter preservation period when we visited, so instead we saw, encased in her sub-zero glass tomb, one of her mummified fellow-victims. She looked tiny. And you can`t help but wonder what went through her mind as the intoxicants kicked in and before the blow came.

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We were an hour out of town, close to 10pm, before we were halted. There had been some sort of landlside on the road which couldn`t be cleared until morning, it transpired. So after an hour`s wait and deliberation and discussion among the various Peruvian paterfamilias on the bus who went down to negotiate with the authorities, we returned to town. Maybe 9am tomorrow, maybe 10.... Returning from Mario`s befuddled orbit the next morning with a British fellow-evacuee, we had checked our bags in before the the rueful lady behind the desk confirmed that actually, no, it still wasn`t clear. Maybe tonight? she suggested with an air of wishful thinking. Ten hot, sun-burned hours later - where it emerged that, yes! There were indeed mountains beyond the city! we successfully boarded our Cuzco bus, bound for the heart of Empire itself.

Arequipa twilight above the walls of Santa Catalina

I remembered our second day, where we`d walked over to the suburb of Yanahuara to check out the views and treat ourselves, after a few days self-catering, to the friendly garden restaurant El Cebillano - reputed to have some of the best ceviche in town. Lunch didn`t disappoint and neither did the views from the plaza at the San Juan Bautista de Yanahuara. I`d wondered at how, in a volcanic city, the incredible buildings stood so firm and the art so unspoiled; the riches so resolutely abundant. But then, looking out over the white city from the hill, I thought that - if I was Pachamama - I`d probably spare Arequipa the worst too.