Coca Canyon

A typical breakfast of cheese ham scrambled eggs jam and bread, coffee our first taste of Coca tea and we were off. We headed to the Coca Canyon at 08:00ish lamenting not having seen enough of Arequipa and with heavy backpacks full of wet laundry.

The tour bus was about 12 people plus driver and a guide. She had decent english but a thick accent made it hard to understand her. She gave us some good information along the way, but overall she was more a den mother than tour guide. Jen and I are always at odds with tours. In our experience the good/bad ratio is 40/60. This was somewhere in between. The locations we went to would have been hard to get too any other way. We were rushed through all the sights of interest, and an impromptu to stop for photos would be strictly out of the question. She wasn’t able or willing to answer questions very well instead kept on script most of the time. We did meet some nice people on the tour, which we would otherwise have not.

Day one introduced us to the highlands; our peek elevation was approximately 3900 M. We ended the days touring in Chivay, a remote little agricultural town about 4 hours NE of Arequipa. It has little to offer but we hadn’t a lot of free time to explore it.  Very beautiful though and seemingly little has changed than before the time of the Incas.


A note on our hotel. The place was a little run down and not that clean. The manager helped us with our laundry by showing me a clothesline behind the hotel. The place was cold as hell is hot, the power outlets didn’t work in the entire hotel and the wifi that was promised and why we went for the more expensive hotel didn’t work. (Probably due to the lack of power). This said we had hot water and that was more than some of our travel companions in other hotels could say.  The manager did collect our clothes from the line when it began raining as we were out. There was a restaurant and bar downstairs that we gave a miss after attempting to play pool on the table with a couple of balls missing.

Despite my general unwillingness to join in group activities Jen and I joined a few of the others for planned events that afternoon and evening. We tried out the local hot springs, 15-minute walk from town (had to take the tour bus). I thought Jen had grabbed my things but she hadn’t so I opted to walk back to town to get them. Along the way I came across an Andean woman struggling with a small herd of unruly cattle. With her permission I helped push the cattle up the road to her farm. That was fun and definitely off script. I grabbed my gear and hopped a collectivo back to the pool.

Later that evening we went for dinner at a place that had Peruvian dance. Dedicated to tourists but I must admit we had a great time. If I’m ever able to get video on my blog I’ll post the video of this crazy dance where the dancers, man and woman, take turns poisoning, knocking out, abducting and beating up each other. Audience participation was mandatory. I was made to lay on the floor while the Peruvian girl beat me in the groin with some sort of sash with a large knot at the end of it. I was then supposed to get up dance around, throwing her over my shoulder. After the hours on the bus and bumpy roads my back wasn’t allowing me to throw anyone onto my shoulder. Jen on the other hand was most definitely being danced around on some masked mans shoulder (even though he was half her size).