Nowtopian

Arequipa, Peru

Once again, I resume the tale of our trip to Ecuador and Peru from late February to late March, 2011. Sorry for the slowness, and the long absence from blogging about other topics. My new book (you can see the link at right) “Ten Years That Shook the City: San Francisco 1968-78” came out and we’ve been super busy with it since the beginning of June, including having put up a 24-stop self-guided audio walking tour that you can follow online if you like. After this entry on Arequipa, I’ll have another on Lima and finally will reconnect to books, San Francisco, politics, and the usual gamut of topics.

We arrived in Arequipa around 11 p.m. after riding buses all day from Cuzco. It sits in a gently sloping valley and at night the place is all lit up, the urban area stretching for huge distances in every direction. We didn’t realize that Arequipa was so big, even though we’d read it was Peru’s 2nd largest city.

In the center of Arequipa, a colonial city with incredible architecture, there are dozens of these 17th century courtyards that have been converted to shopping centers. Still, really beautiful!

We were pretty tired after the four days on the Inca Trail, and the 14 hours on the bus from Cuzco, so we took it slow and started by finding a great restaurant near our hotel to enjoy some famously great eating.

At Las Conchitas we had incredible seafood meals two or three times while we were in Arequipa.

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Across the Altiplano

We spent a day riding the bus from Cuzco to Juliaca, and then south to Arequipa. This is about 3 hours south of Cuzco.

We slept about 5 hours in Cuzco after getting back from Machu Picchu, and got on the special “cama bus” we’d booked before leaving for the hike. Well our so-called bed bus was a broken down piece of crap, and the reclining seats didn’t really recline, and the place for our feet was broken too…

No way to sleep, but I was so fascinated by the passing landscape that I couldn't rest anyway. It was a gorgeous day and the views were amazing.

Lots of snowy mountains during the early part of the ride.

Once again we were fighting to get photos from a jostling bus, but once in a while it would stop and we'd be able to lean out and get a shot that wasn't vibrating.

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Machu Picchu at last

The iconic view of Machu Picchu, amidst swirling clouds, March 12, 2011.

As noted at the end of the last post, we hiked to Machu Picchu in dense fog amidst dense crowds. All 500 of us that had official permits to visit the historic site on this day were lined up at the gate, which opened at 6:30 a.m. and off we went. It was a super easy hike compared to the previous three days, only an hour and a half or so to get to the fogged-in “Sun Gate,” followed by another 20 minutes of hiking along in the clouds before we came to the end. Still couldn’t see much, but then we did a zig-zag down to the official entry point, a modern Park facility with bathrooms and storage and gift shop and adjacent fancy hotel and restaurant, and nearby bus stop where a fleet of shuttles goes up and down the 2,000 feet from Aguascalientes (or “Machu Picchu city”) below continuously all day.

We went in and through a small passage in a wall and suddenly we were there!

This is a few steps inside the main entry point. After three+ days on the Inca Trail it felt great to have made it!

Eric kept us together as a group for the next two hours, taking us on a guided tour of the whole place, in and out of the famous sites, the Sun Temple, the sundial, the quarry, and much more. Having been prepared by the previous ruins and before that the amazing sites in Cuzco and even earlier in Ingapirca in Ecuador, it was sweet to have the climax be so well contextualized.