Day 42 - Arequipa.

Actually, the title of this blog’s a bit of a misnomer: I’ve calculated that I’m actually travelling for 12 weeks, so that makes it 84 days, rather than ninety. I’m halfway through.
8am start after sleeping the sleep of the dead. Decide to try and see all the major sights today and leave tomorrow for the less exciting practical stuff. Start by admiring the Compañia and Santo Domingo churches near the Plaza de Armas, with their distinctive carved stone façades.

Find myself walking around some back streets south of the plaza and make a serendipitous discovery. Lured by a ‘free entrance’ sign, I find myself in a fascinating little museum that’s full of clamouring schoolchildren and is not in any of the guidebooks. It focuses on the Inca and pre-Inca desert civilisations of Peru, and there some great examples of Inca weaponry, tribal pottery, feathered ceremonial capes and – best of all – several mummies. Unlike Egyptian mummies, all of these ones are in sitting position, legs drawn up to their chests, skulls resting on bony fingers. Brilliant stuff.

My second serendipitous discovery is the Cevichería Fory Fay (that’s how Peruvian pronounce ‘forty-five’), a very local lunch spot doing seven kinds of ceviche and the world’s most humungous portions of seafood fried rice. I’m not terribly impressed with my predecessor’s choice of eateries: they’ve actually included a Johnny Coyote, a substandard burger joint, and the point is to show our readers eateries which are both cheap AND good, rather than just cheap and bog-standard.

Still on the subject of mummies: I wrap up warm and pop across the road to the museum housing Juanita the Ice Princess. Though you can’t go around by yourself, and have to go as part of a guided tour, the way they’ve organised it is excellent. First, you sit through a twenty-minute National Geographic video of how Juanita was discovered, which was in 1995 on top of the 6,380m Ampato volcano, by the local climber Carlos Zarate and American archaeologist Johan Reinhard (Johan = Juan in Spanish, hence ‘Juanita’). The video shows how she was removed from the icy hold of the mountain after days of painstaking work, and the dramatic voiceover suggests that when this chosen 12-year old girl was sacrificed to the gods of the mountains, she did in fact achieve a kind of immortality, for after five hundred years, she still speaks to us, and through her we hear the Incas.

The guide then leads us around various exhibits, showcasing the kinds of offerings that would have been buried with the child sacrifices. She explains that Juanita, given that she was wearing the Inca robes of white and red (white = divinity, red = power), she must have come from a noble family, for only being given to the gods was an honour that only the most beautiful children from exalted lineage could hope for. During their lives, they would receive the best of everything, then taken to the top of a mountain, they’d be drugged with coca infusion and killed with a single precise blow to the head. She would have gone to her death willingly, believing that she was doing it for her people. I guess it's no more bizarre to do that in the name of a higher power than to exterminate people whose beliefs clash with your own, or to ban your child from celebrating their birthday because you're not sure when Jesus's birthday was.

Finally, we get to see Juanita herself, frozen in sitting position, her hair intact on her skull, kept in a special chamber at -15 degrees Celsius. It’s an arresting sight.

Since this is one of two nights per week when the Santa Catalina monastery is open late, I opt to wander around by myself for a couple of hours, peering into nooks and crannies of this citadel, consisting of many little streets, numerous cloisters, chapels, gardens, and cells where the nuns lived. The original nuns were often daughters from rich families who kept numerous servants after allegedly giving up worldly comforts and dedicating their lives to God and led quite lavish lives until Sister Josefa Cadena put a stop to it in 1871. After that, the residents of the convent never left its walls and it was completely shut off from the rest of the world until 1970.

It’s beautiful – a real paradise for photographers. The afternoon light illuminates interesting corners of courtyards, which themselves are painted in attractive hues of terracotta, deep blue and brilliant white. They make you walk around the complex clockwise, but since I stay on for a second lap when the sun goes down, I’m rewarded with lantern-lit streets and nuns’ living quarters illuminated with candlelight.

Fellow tourists must think that something’s not right with me; my leg muscles are not as stiff as feared, but since I still find it difficult to walk up and down stairs, I’ve perfected a way of scuttling sideways, like a crab. That, and I fall out of doorways.

Meet Patrick and Annemarie for dinner. There’s some sort of protest going on in the plaza; a guy with a microphone rambles on about the death of some guy, while the people sitting behind him light candles and hold up his picture. “They killed his wife and children! No one cares!” He doesn’t say who killed them, but it makes me wonder whether the police are somehow complicit.

We feast on alpaca and ostrich at Zig Zag, recommended by Mike, and it’s very good indeed. Annemarie is off to Bolivia via Puno, while Patrick is leaving on the overnight bus to Nazca. He’s a brave man; night buses are notorious robbery targets. He wants to go to Bolivia, but it’s very difficult for Americans now: they have to get a visa, fill out tons of paperwork and show that they have enough money to cover their stay in Bolivia, which is a joke. It’s payback time for the indignities suffered by Bolivians in US consulates. Patrick and I find a juicery/ frozen yogurt place and pass the time before his bus leaves, chatting about Japan. He spent two years on a Jet program there, teaching English, and I visited my friend Subo when he did the same, so we swap our recollections of that weird and wonderful country.

My walk back is accompanied by a rousing panpipe version of Aqua’s “Barbie Girl” being blasted forth from a garbage truck. I’ll file that under ‘Only In Peru’.