Ica, Nazca and Juanita.

Friends and Family;

I am in the wonderfully colonial city of Arequipa, famous for “Juanita,” Colca canyon and the wild parties that rage on every Saturday night.  More on that in a minute.

About a week ago I left the wonderful city of Ayacucho for the city of Ica, famous for a desert oasis on the outskirts of town called Huacachina.  Tourism is supposed to be all the rage, with activities ranging from sandboarding to dune hiking to watch the sunset.  Everything was supposed to be really fun and cool for a night, but it wasn’t so.  As my luck would have it, the hostel I thought I had booked was not actually the hostel I’d booked, and I found myself leaving Huacachina fifteen minutes after I got there, to end up in the middle of the boonies of Ica.  I was very impressed with myself at that point.  This, of course, didn’t really allow me to fully appreciate the wonders of Ica, and I left early in the morning to get on the next bus to Nazca.

Nazca is a word rarely ever heard unless it has the word “lines” next to it.  The glyphs sit on the desert floor and are perfect geometric patterns that one can see from far above for aboute $US 90, which I of course didn’t do.  I did however take the bus out to the lookout points and enjoyed the glyphs that way, returning later on to eat with some Swiss guys I’d met at a local museum.  Thus ended my experience in the desert towns of Peru.

A night bus later, I pulled into Arequipa, a city that has a resonating reputation even before you get there.  The bus was completely full with a French tour group, and they were most definately not going to Peru to enjoy the colonial architecture. During the whole bus ride, I saw several flasks full of what they claimed was unmixed pisco (the local liquor), and they got louder and louder, no matter how high the attendant cranked the volume on the horrible Adam Sandler movie.  A wonderful bus ride it was, and not much sleep was had.

Arequipa was quieter when I got in.  With its reputation, I was expecting a party to be raging when I pulled in around 2am, but no such party was happening.  Instead, everybody was quiet, in their beds and snoring away (loudly).  The brass-knuckle-wearing security guard showed me to my bed and I fell asleep.

The next day I woke up and went to discover “Juanita,” the ice maiden of Arequipa.  Several years ago, a mountainer came accross a well-preserved mummy on the Ampato mountain.  The girl was 12 or 13 years old, and as was obvious to the researchers, a sacrifice made to appease the mountain god.  The body, having sat in a hole in the ground at -10 degrees for several hundred years, was very well preserved and now sits in a glass freezer in a local museum, the crown jewel of a well-done exhibition.

I thoroughly enjoyed this museum, but I did not enjoy it nearly as much as the hungover French tour group.