Arrived in Arequipa at 7 o'clock in the morning. It's a nice city with white houses, beautiful Plaza de Armas, and surrounded by several snow-capped volcanoes.
Tomorrow will explore the city some more (today spent most of the time sleeping as couldn't properly rest in the overnight Cruz del Sur from Nazca to Arequipa). Then will probably go on a 3-days/2-nights Colca canyon trip. Besides offering views to condors, colonial churches, llamas, and a deep canyon, it also serves as acclimatization, as afterwards we plan to do some volcano climbing.
The local tour companies offer 2-days/1-night trips to both El Misti (5822m; hike starts at 3400m, camp at 4800m) and Chachani (6075m; hike starts at 5000m, camp at 5400m). Both are supposed to be technically easy, i.e. crampons are not needed, ice axe maybe. After talking to several tour companies it stayed unclear which hike would make more sense for us and how much acclimatization we need to do beforehand, sleeping at 5000m should not be taken lightly. (No tour company seems to offer trips that would contain acclimatization days.)
2010-02-01
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I got two postcards from you today (thanks) -- one from Manaus (first stamped on Dec 12, 2009) and one from Galapagos (written on Jan 18, 2010). How they could arrive on the same day is a big mystery to me.
ReplyDelete@Tanel, yes, it's weird. The first card was posted in Tabatinga on 2009-12-22 if I remember correctly. Tabatinga is in the middle of nowhere but they have an airport there so it's shouldn't take that long.
ReplyDeleteMaybe in the Suomen Posti (or whatever it's called) they stack all your mail and deliver it all on one day when the stack starts to overflow...