Mi Aventura a Arequipa!

Well, a LOT has happened since I last updated this blog. Nothing too exciting happened during the week. But, this weekend was such a blast! Me and 8 of my classmates from Nebraska journeyed to the beautiful Colca Valley near the city of Arequipa!

Our plane left on Friday morning bright and early at 6:00am. The problem is, we (thought we lived) live close to an hour away from the airport and we wanted to be there within at least 1.5 or 2 hours early. To make matters worse, our professor, Marta from UNK came down with a terrible case of food poisoning on Thursday evening, so she was unable to make the trip with us. We were so bummed for her! But, we met with Marta before we left and of course she said the show must go on. After some rearranging, we all met at UPC at 2:45am...some of us with only an hour or less of sleep. But, we were off!

We arrived at the airport in Arequipa at 7:30am and had about a 2 hour wait for our guide to pick us up.  Gonzalo picked us up and helped us carry our luggage to the bus as we met the other passengers from Peru and Chile who joined us on the journey. Colca Valley is about a good 3 hours or more from Arequipa, so we had a long day ahead of us. To top it all off, we were driving up into the mountains at a very high altitude. Needless to say, after the first hour or so of driving many of us were already feeling sick. Our first stop was at a little store with a restroom and people selling homemade goods. Here, we also tried mate de coca, which is pretty much hot tea with coca leaves in it. (tasted like green tea to me) It is supposed to help cure the symptoms of altitude sickness and make you feel better. Thankfully it helped for a while, but the trip kept getting higher and higher. After a while, the tea wore off and we were all ready to get off of that dang bus!

After we arrived at our hotel in Chivay (in Colca Valley) we took a short siesta and got ready to head to the hot springs with the group. The pool looked really dirty, but it was very relaxing...as it was natural, hot water being filtered into the area. After the hot springs, we got ready and ate supper with the rest of the group.


We went to a nice little restaurant that had live entertainment for us. There were four men singing and playing instruments, and every once in a while there were traditional dances performed for us. During a few of the songs, the dancers would pick people out of the audience to come up and dance with them. Of course, I was the lucky one.


The dance I was talked into doing was a very odd one. It involved a piece of fruit being carried around by one dancer and the other dancer chasing after it. Once they receive the fruit they fall to the floor because it was apparently poisonous. In order to wake up the poisoned dancer, the other takes a whip-like rope and hits the unconscious dancer's legs with it. After finally awakening the sick dancer (the woman), the male dancer throws the female dancer over his shoulder and carries her away. Of course, when I was asked to come up and dance I got to reenact this. Yes, I was whipped fairly roughly on my legs and yes I was thrown over a dancer's shoulders like a sack of potatoes and carried away. It was a great time.

The next day, we woke up and began exploring Colca Valley very early around 6:30am. We stopped at many different view points and got some great pictures. (Check Facebook to see more!) Unfortunately the later it got, the cloudier it got so after a while we didn't have the best view. This was especially disappointing when we got to "el cruce de condor" where we were supposed to have a good chance of seeing condors. When I say it was cloudy...I mean we were literally IN the clouds. It was so weird. Luckily, we did see a few condors but they were so far away that it didn't really seem to affect me. I am, however, glad that this was really the only disappointing factor of the tour.

After touring more of Colca Valley, we returned to Arequipa and found our next hotel, which was really like a bed and breakfast. It was very, very nice and it had a full kitchen and living room that we were allowed to use whenever we wanted. Since we ended up spending more money on food during the tour than we thought, we decided to hit up the local grocery store and fix up a good old' supper of mac and cheese with ham sandwiches and fresh fruit. It was so delicious and we had a good time making it together! This will always be a special memory for me when I think about the trip.

One pretty scary thing we found out when we were traveling in Arequipa was the fact that there were about 18 deaths in Arequipa due to the insane amount of rain. Apparently this day was the most rain that they had ever had! We didn't see much of the destruction or flooding, but some of us had host parents and Peruvian friends calling/texting us to make sure we were safe. We had no idea rain could be so deadly!

After eating, we played cards and hung out together. Then, we decided that we wanted to go out downtown and see what the discos were like in Arequipa. We had a blast and danced until we were exhausted! We were all ready to go home the next day, but it was pretty hard to leave such a beautiful place!

This week has been pretty busy with homework for classes here and for my online classes, but nothing too interesting has been happening so far. I am really excited to say that next weekend (Feb 21st) I will be heading to Cusco to see Machu Picchu! I am so ready to go and I can hardly wait! Thanks again to everyone reading this and keeping tabs on what I'm up to. Homesickness has definitely started kicking in...especially when February rolled around. But, I am loving my time here and I can't believe how fast time has flown.

Hasta luego!