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A handful of dried up leaves and a crumbly stone that acts as activator, to chew on beats hands down the worst thing I´ve consumed on my trip so far (much worse than baby goat, alpaca and prickly pear) but as opposed to just sampling the local delicacies as was the case with those. Coca leaves have a practical purpose, to aid breathing and combat the symptoms of altitude sickness. So I´m in a bus on my way to the Colca Canyon, the deepest canyon in the worldand we´re going to get to heights of 5000 mts. I`m chewing away and my tongues going numb but unfortunately I can still taste and I´m staving off swallowing the juice produced until absolutely necessary. The bus tunes are a welcome distraction. We started with 50´s rock & roll, visited the 80´s with the inevitable power ballads and now seem to be hovering around the 70´s. Having just passed a lorry on it´s side, crates of produce spilled everywhere becoming fruit salad roadkill, plus overtaking on blind bends, I´m clinging to my seat belt and hoping the coca leaves have a calming effect on the mind as well as the body.
Further up the road and after another wad of coca leaves, we were victims of highway robbery. Well our bandit was about 6 and holding a rope across the road to impede passage. He was bought off with a cob of corn and we continued our way through a rubbly hilly landscape with vicunas (same family as Llamas) grazing on the outcrops of grass and moss.
Despite my best efforts come 4,500 metres, we stop for a pee stop and to take photos of Alpacas and my heads starting to whirl. Alice and a couple of the boys clambered over a stone wall to relieve themselves and people on the bus behind us stared in confusion at the back of Alice ¨peeing like a man¨ A quick explanation later and the fame of the she-pee spreads.
We summited at 5000 metres and saw snow falling, then descended to a mirador (lookout) over Chivay our destination. At the mirador were some locals selling handicrafts and a beautiful little girl dressed up in the colourful embroidered indigenious dress that everyone wears in Colca Canyon (yes apparently even when tourists aren´t around!). She had a pet baby llama and we all went mad snapping piccies of them and giving her a sol each. Little did we know that at every mirador we arrived at there would be the apparently ubiquitious little girl and llama. For me it was a case of first in best dressed. I already had gainded the fame of being over the top snap happy, well I can´t help it, it´s a photographer´s paradise, but on this 2 day tour I only have 40 shots left and a low battery and we´ve got canyons and markets and hopefully condors to see yet - agh the panic is rising!! By the way of course you´ll all be welcome to slideshows (ha, ha better start thinking up excuses now)
It´s o.k, it was touch and go for a while at the condor lookout as I got down to the wire and had to start deleting previous shots of the condor in the hope of getting a better one. I ending up with about 5 specky images where if I zoom in 100% I can make out a birdlike shape. Of course the condor flew directly over really close to lookout, as I´d come down from it. Pesky nature. The cop out was to buy a postcard but then I realised all the condors had been superimposed onto them -badly.
We returned to Arequipa weighed down from the 5 gourmet buffets we´d had in a row to dine refreshingly at a non touristy mexican (does anyone actually like the panpipe music they play in the restaurants here?) Burritos and many jugs of sangria later, next stop was a karaoke bar where we were the only one´s intersted in singing, we excitedly scoured the songbook (unfortunately Fever wasn´t there!) and massacred Girls just wanna have fun, a roxette number and some other song that I only knew one line of but didn´t stop me participating. The locals tried hard to ignore us. It was really strange though, despite us putting in requests to do more numbers, and noone else singing we didn´t get called up again. Very wierd!! So a duck into a club next and it was still too early for dancing so there was nothing for it but to retreat to ¨Swedish Alley¨for happy hour beers. Lance & Rob, infused maybe by the Scandinavian atmosphere decided to sit on a step in the middle of the bar with their trousers around thier ankles. The worrying thing is that noone even gave them a second glance. They lolled around giving us all a far better view of their bonds pants than any of us really wanted. We did manage to discourage them from stripping off their t-shirts as well though (well until later) After an adequate amount of drinking we hit the club again and did our best salsa efforts on sticky floors in thongs. Just like the karaoke earlier, it wasn´t a pretty sight.
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