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The peacocks let us be so we got a greats nights' sleep. The next day was spent on the truck with the exception of lunch, which we had on the side of a dusty road and a couple of toilet breaks. We made it to Puerta Inca in good time, about 4.30pm and went straight out into the sands to visit the ancient Chauchilla cemetary. These had been discovered recently by modern day grave robbers and the mummies had been perfectly preserved in the dry sand. Their gold and treasures had been stolen but the mummies themselves have remained untouched. They still have fingernails and hair that you can see from the tops of the graves. It was graphic to say the least with newborn babies on show wrapped in their preserved skin and textiles. It was a lot like The Mummy film except for the evil murdering Mummy intent on revenge and slaughtering the villagers! And Daniel is no Brendan Fraser!
Puerta Inca is the ancient fishing village of the Inca's and would have been the only source of fish to Cusco. It was also important as a lookout point when the Inquisition arrived in South America. Before dinner we hiked into the rocks around the cove and discovered a ruined Inca city with a graveyard. Here we could see the remains of hundreds of people on the surface of the rocks and sand unexcavated, and easy to reach! Only the "Poltergeist" stopped me from bringing one home! We made a campfire on the beach and cooked dinner on the side embers and passed around a bottle of dark rum to keep out the cold. The next day took us seven hours on the truck to get to Arequipa and it was our first day climbing into altitude. After about 4 hours I began to feel a bit nauseus and I woke Dan who advised looking at something far away and focusing on it. A great tip for the middle of desert! We stopped for an hour at the local olive groves and tried some olives there. We thought they would be nicer if they were fresh. We were wrong. We got to Arequipa late in the afternoon, set up camp, had dinner and a glass of Peru's finest cartoned wine. The altitude had hit me hard so I went to bed early where I froze until morning!
The next day after breakfast Daniel and I, along with a couple of guys from the truck went into the local market where we purchased hats, blankets and ponchos. Slightly strange considering we were in heats of 35C! We managed to haggle them down to half the price they suggested and paid less for them than we did for the bottle of wine.The market had everything. What you can't buy in a Peruvian market, you can't buy! Not an inch of meat is wasted so we found ourselves walking through aisles of chicken feet, llama tongues and goats heads. Wine - 40 soles. Alpaca blanket - 20 soles. Cheese - 3 soles. Dan's face when he saw the Llama testicles - priceless! The rest day of the day is planned around visitng Juanita in her own museum. Juanita was found in the ice of the Andes. Thousands of years old and perfectly preserved she is the world's most famous Mummy and we're lucky that she is in Peru as she travels most of the time. After that we'll be joining some of the guys from our tour at the night monastery.
Thought of the Day: Regardless of the label, generally speaking, it won't be chicken!
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