Arequipa was more than 7000 feet high. Once we left Arequipa, we spent every day even higher than that in the Andes Mountains, until we finally flew back to Lima. On October 5, 2022, we rode through the Peruvian national park, Reserva Nacional Salinas y Aguada Blanca, to our hotel, the Colca Lodge, along the Rio Colca. Dave had an altitude app on his iPhone, and he kept track of how high we were, summiting the pass at 16,000 feet. A number of the members of our tour got altitude sickness, including Dave.
As our bus left Arequipa, I spotted a building in the distance that looked just like the LDS Temple in Tucson, Arizona. "What's that building?" I asked our guide. "It's a Mormon church," he said. "They have them all over Peru." I thought the Arequipa temple was still under construction, but I wished I had checked to see if we could have attended a temple session there the previous night, instead of relaxing in our beautiful hotel room.
As soon as we left Arequipa, our bus began climbing higher and higher, into increasingly barren countryside. Soon, we began to see herds of vicuna, whose wool is finer than thread and the most expensive of the different types of wool. Vicunas cannot be domesticated. They run wild, which makes their wool even scarcer and more valuable. During our tour of Peru, we saw all four of the large mammals distinctive to the country--llamas, alpacas, guanacos, and vicunas. Only llamas and alpacas are domesticated. Alpaca wool is expensive in the U.S., but even tiny souvenir shops sell it in Peru.
When we made a rest stop, I watched a llama explore the men's restroom, and then get herded out!
We tried "Inka cola", a popular local drink, with our box lunches. We decided it really did taste like bubble gum, as we had been told!
We stopped at the top of the 16,000 foot high pass. Of course, there was a collection of ladies, selling their souvenirs.
There was also a restroom, labeled "free," but you had to pay. Only in Peru--we could see smoke coming out of a volcano behind the "free toilet" sign.
And there were thousands of cairns, left by passers-by as monuments.
We finally arrived in the Colca area. Tourism is one of Peru's main industries, and everywhere there were welcome signs, souvenir stands, and women in native dress with their llamas, waiting for photographers.
We stayed at the Colca Lodge, which my Lonely Planet guidebook described as "Expensive and utterly romantic, this is the Colca Canyon packaged for the decadent, with artistically manicured grounds spreading majestically beside the rippling Rio Colca. Lavish rooms come loaded with dapper dressing gowns, wood-burning stoves, candles, coffee machines and king beds, but the real carrot is the alfresco thermal baths sculpted into whimsical pools beside the river." We donned dressing gowns and soaked in the hot tubs before dinner.
This photo is from Google Images. The food really did look that good, but no wine!
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