Arequipa and the Colca Canyon (Peru)

"When the moon separated from the earth, it forgot to take Arequipa". This is how locals describe their city, which is surrounded by mountains, volcanos and huge deserted areas.

We found a nice hostel in the city center, so we were finally able to take a shower after almost 2 days and believe me... that was really necessary!
The center was beautiful: lots of chuches, a huge cathedral, monestaries and colonial-style houses. We visited the main monestary, which was like a small village inside the city. Although it was created just after the invasion of the Spanish conquistadores, there were still nuns living in pretty basic circumstances, avoiding all direct contact with 'normal' people.

Again we were impressed by the local cuisine. The rocoto relleno (hot pepper stuffed with lama meat) was amazing and flushing it away with a good Arequipeña (the local beer) was even better. And all this for only 12€... for the both of us!

One day in that city was more than enough and we were really looking forward to check out the beatiful surroundings of Arequipa. We booked a 2-day guided tour to the Colca Canyon. After picking up all the people for the tour, everybody had to present themself, which was followed by a big applause. Interesting to see how many nationalities you meet on such a trip and quite stereotype as well: there was the big, very loud American who all knew best, two gigling chinese girls with gigantic cameras, a crazy guy from Argentina with a big mouth and further more some decent people from Europe.
During the first day, we were going to reach 5000 meters above sea level, so the guide told us to chew coca leafs to avoid altitude sickness. Never had such a bad taste in my mouth, but in the end it helped a lot. Joke didn't want to touch it ever again and in the afternoon, she felt a bit bad. The nature during these two days was awesome. On an altitude of 5 km, we had great views on the volcanos. We saw thousands of lamas and alpacas and deserted landscapes. We went to the world's deepest canyon (over 4000m deep), which was according to the American in our group, also much prettier than the famous Grand Canyon.
The last day we woke up early to go for some condor spotting. In an area with several miradors, we had to wait more than an hour, but finally we saw four big condors flying through the canyon. They stayed with us for about ten minutes. Unforgetable...