Arica to Arequipa: we travel to Peru

Being beside the sea in Arica was invigorating - our hotel was right on the water's edge and the crashing of the surf at night is something I have always loved. But it was time to explore again.

None in our small party was keen to spend another day on the road travelling through the desert but we were all looking forward to Arequipa. Our bus was late because of the danger of land mines! Pretty serious reason. The Chileans laid many land mines half a century ago in their fight with the Peruvians over land on the border. It was believed they had all been found until recent unusual rains exposed two - one on land and one that floated down to the sea and so there has been a serious search to find any more. The border was shut and our bus was coming from Peru. So when we finally did go through the long process of checking out of Chile and into Peru we couldn't help but feel a little apprehensive.
The desert in this part of world is like an endless moonscape and makes you aware just how resourceful and tough the early inhabitants must have been. At times the drive was pretty hairy as the Peruvians played cat and mouse on a 2-lane highway  that twisted it's way through the Andes.
Our arrival at our superbly comfortable accommodation in a hotel that was once a large house in the heart of Arequipa was late.
Today we explored. Arequipa is the second largest city in Peru and since our last visit 6 years ago, the population has increased to around 1.2 million and prospered - and with prosperity has come a huge increase traffic and pollution - there are 40,000 taxis!!

Arequipa is a truly picturesque city and the Inca terraces on the outskirts are an important part of its history. We visited an old palace and the local markets (picture shows one of the potato sellers)  and lunched in a picanteria. Picanterias are local restaurants that feature local produce and we enjoyed the local prawns, ceviche,  fried fish and a risotto sitting under a pergola in what felt like a back garden. A pigeon joined us making a noise like a frog! which is what we thought it was until we asked. After lunch we visited the beautiful Santa Catalina monastery. This is a huge complex in the heart of the city that takes up about 3 city blocks and houses just 30 nuns - with the rest of the complex open as a museum. It was originally built at the end of the 16th century and was the home of an order of cloistered nuns. It is possible to visit the cells that were home to the nuns, to walk the streets of their little town and to try to understand the sort of hard, religious life they led.
Tomorrow we set off to Colca Canyon in search of condors - so it is an early night for me.
(no pics of Santa Catalina at this stage - they are on my iphone, not my camera).

The driest place in the world and an amazing village

Driving across the Atacama Desert is the type of trip you only want to do once in a lifetime - unless you love deserts, which I don't. I have never driven across the Australian desert, but it is not on my wish list - now I have driven across the driest desert in the world. It is so dry that there are no glaciers even on mountains that are around 7,000 metres!! And it is seemingly endless.

We left San Pedro early in the morning as the sun rose and headed across the desert to C and then north towards our destination of Arica. What was planned as an 11 hour drive ended up being about 14 hours because of stops to see geoglyphs (large designs made of stone and drawn on the sides of mountains and hillsides as 'signposts' to ancient travellers and traders) and to visit the absolutely fascinating town of Humberstone - which made watching desert go by for hours on end, fascinating.
I love history - especially social history - and this ghost town is in an amazing state of preservation and presents a very vivid picture of what life must have been like living in a mining town over 150 years ago.

James Humberstone founded a mining town to extract saltpetre (sodium nitrate) from the desert ground in 1872. Built along the lines of an English village, it only resembles one physically. Workers were brought from surrounding Peru and Bolivia as well as Chile under a system of indentured labour that gave them no escape. The work must have been hard - and certainly the conditions were brutal. A strike in the nearby town of Iqueque in 1907 led to the massacre of hundreds of the thousands who had made their way to a point where they were demanding better pay and conditions.
Today you enter the village, which is listed on the UNESCO List of World Heritage in Danger, by the houses of the lowest of the workers next to the Pan American highway. Having spent a day travelling through the dust, heat and utter barrenness of the desert coming to a town that resembled an English village was surreal. The single men's quarters were two very rudimentary rooms which now display toys, household equipment, tools and items of daily life that have been retrieved from the  houses. The town was abandoned in the early 1960s and was vandalised but enough remained so that when it was  declared a World Heritage Site in 2005 it was possible to start to put it back together.
Around 2,000 to 3,000 people lived in the village. There was a town square, a market, a bandstand, a fire brigade, a hotel with the most amazing swimming pool made from the hull of a shipwreck situated behind, and a huge wooden theatre. Mostly built of wood (brought back in the ships that took the sodium nitrate away) the houses go from rudimentary to 4 bedroom houses with indoor bathrooms and maid's quarters for the upper echelon.
And then there's the mining equipment. Huge piles of tailings or overburden rise behind the village school next to which are the remains of the processing plants and the huge machines that were used to grind and process the rock.
Our group explored for about 2 hours, and left reluctantly. We had to head off and onwards and didn't arrive in Arica until almost 10pm. A long, long road.

Next 2 days (Sunday and Monday) we spent exploring the city. Our hotel is situated right on the beach (we all thought about tsunamis when we saw how close, as we are in earthquake region). It is wonderful to hear the crashing of the Pacific ocean at night - and to breath the salty sea air. Arica has an interesting history having been a battleground between Chile and Peru, a fishing port (very smelly up one end in the afternoon) and being situated so close to such arid land. One of the most interesting attractions is the archaeological museum that contains mummies that have been unearthed in excavations of the city and surrounding countryside. Dating back thousands of years the mummies are presented in an excellent display and I can now say that my knowledge of mummification is greatly improved!
Tomorrow we are off again - up the highway and into Peru and beautiful mountain town of Arequipa.