Day 83 01.10.15
After breakfast it was travel day time. We headed out from Arequipa making a short stop to stock up on coca products, be it coca leaves, coca sweets or coca tea. Coca is used in Peru against the altitude. It helps the production of red blood cells, which help you be able to carry more oxygen through your body. The coca sweets are great, but chewing these coca leaves is just plain disgusting (at least for me). The coca leaves are quite bitter, but what is worse (for me), is the catalyser that is used to get the substances from the coca leaves quicker into your system. These catalysers are super sweet, and so whenever you chew on these bitter leaves you get a quick sudden sweet kick, which is just not my thing…
Driving onwards we got to see more landscape. I feel like it is every changing – at least ever so little.
From a rocky landscape, to shrubbier and sandier landscape.
Here on the hills of the volcanoes we got to spot our first vicuñas out in the wild. It was quite fun to spot them, since their fur does well in camouflaging them.
We drove and drove and drove and eventually reached a little bar / restaurant / tourist meeting point / bathroom spot, where I got to try my first coca tea. Actually I had an Inca tea, which contains all these herbs. Apart from the coca leaves (on the right), it also contains munya mint (one left of the coca leaves) and other herbs I forgot their names of, which help you with stomach problems, altitude problems and are just plain healthy.
We also arrived just in time to order, as after us two large buses reached the spot and we would have had to wait for ages. So instead we used the time wisely and headed off before the masses of tourists would follow us suit.
We reached a little alpaca and llama herd and took some pictures.
The string on the ears of the llamas and alpacas are only woven in and help the farmer to be able to recognise his own animals when they are mixed in with others.
As we were now climbing higher and higher, the landscape got rockier and we could see less and less shrubs.
Finally we reached the lookout point, which is located on the highest point of the whole trip (including the Machu Picchu trek) at 4,910 metres.
From here you can see the different volcanoes and also some offerings to the Pacha Mama (mother earth). These are little stone piles, that can be found everywhere on this look out point.
I made my own offering too, that my altitude sickness wouldn’t emerge as heavily.
I felt out of breath and had a little headache, but apart from that I was ok, there were others who weren’t doing so well. I will just have to see how much I can acclimatise before the trek.
From here on out it was a winding road down to Chivay.
We stopped along the way again for pictures and to have a look at what the lovely local ladies had on offer. (But look at the view – isn’t it lovely?)
After arriving in Chivay we quickly stopped for lunch. I was happily digging into the buffet meal, glad to know that the altitude was not yet messing with my appetite.
I tried some alpaca (on the stick), I had some chicken, some pork crackling, some quinoa in a fried ball, some corn and some potato vegetables as well as a cold lentil salad. With that I enjoyed some Chicha Morada.
After having devoured some desert too, I decided it was better to rest a little, as the metabolism slows down in altitude too, and so I opted out of walking to the hot springs and instead took the bus.
The hot springs were heaven! The hot water loosened up our muscles and apart from swimming around we also treated ourselves with some lovely lemonade.
Back at the hotel we rested a little, had a shower, but I wanted to go out and see whether they had one of these traditional skirts. I think they are very pretty and with a normal t-shirt they could be wearable in Europe too. I’ll see whether I’ll be successful…
Before I left to search and have dinner, we had a little power outage, which left the hotel in pitch darkness. Thankfully we knew where we had stored our head torches and so the outage was easier to deal with.
It is cold in Chivay, and therefore I thought it only appropriate to have some Quemadito – “little burn”. This is a drink made from coca leaves, pisco, lime, orange juice and sugar, which is heated up; delicious and completely warming.
I also ordered a three-coloured salad (tomatoes, avocado and cheese), and enjoyed it while the band begun to play.
After a couple of their songs the dances started. The first dance is about a dispute between two families, but the children, a girl from one family and a boy from the other family, are actually in love – a little like Romeo and Juliet. The boy therefore dresses up as a girl to be close to the girl and they dance.
At some point I was asked to dance with them, while the girl chose a man from the audience to do the same. It was fun!
The most interesting part of this show were the costumes of the dancers.
The next dance they put on was a dance about the sowing and the harvest of the corn. As you can see the man is symbolically ploughing the floor and the woman is sowing the seeds.
Again, look at the costumes!
As a main I had a salmon trout (which was pretty much just salmon) with a passion fruit sauce, some potatoes and some beans. Delicious!
The next dance is very weird. It is a dance about a fruit, which when you eat it, you fall to the ground and for a short time you have seizures and spasm. The dance is about the man eating the fruit, falling down and seizing, while the woman doesn’t believe and thinks he is just kidding. Which is why, she decides to hit him with a string or whip, to make him fall out of it. Now, the man eventually comes back around and as I suppose revenge, hands the fruit to the woman and the same thing happens again, including the whipping. Very strange and I don’t know why the man is wearing this weird mask.
After dinner we quickly left the restaurant, headed to the little stalls on the markets that were still open, but didn’t quite find the right items to buy and headed off to the hotel. I chose to “quickly” check the internet, which wasn’t working and so instead while waiting for pages to load I watched some telenovelas (soap operas).
Back to bed, as the next day would be an early start.
