Day 90 - Too spicy!

Arequipa

We had two options for our planned trip to the Colca Canyon the next day - a one day trip with a 3am (!) pickup, or a two day trip overnighting near the canyon in the village of Chivay. After visiting a few agencies we settled on the one day trip, neither of us was keen on stretching what could be done in one long day into two days - we suspected there would have been a lot of waiting around.

Last Supper ... complete with guinea pig?

After sorting that out, we visited the Santa Catalina Monastery. The monastery was huge, covering about 5 acres, and had streets named after Spanish cities, that even looked a little like those cities .... for example Calle Cordoba had flower boxes, Calle Seville had a a water feature, Calle Granada sloped. The old nuns' quarters are very well preserved, many of them were like apartments, with individual kitchens with clay ovens, sitting rooms, and one even had an area for keeping guinea pigs (with live guinea pigs). At its peak it supported up to 450 people, now there are about twenty, living in more modern accommodation away from the prying eyes of pesky tourists like us.

K had read about a well reviewed Indian restaurant in town (imaginatively named "Indian Cusine"), so for dinner we took a gamble and ate there. It was an excellent meal, a little different to what we are used to at home but still quite tasty, though we overdid it by asking for "spicy" - we hadn't expected that it would actually be hot (almost too hot to eat,), this being South America! We did wonder though where they source their spices, as we'd seen nothing like that in any shops in South America so far?