Arequipa is a one of the most popular cities in Peru and it became our home for a little while – about a week and half, which is a substantial about of time when living on the road.  Arequipa brought us several new adventures:

1 – DELISH restaurants and dessert spots.  This little café had, quite possibly, thee BEST carrot cake I’ve ever had in my entire life.  Ever.  We also sampled several different types of crepes at this cool restaurant called Crepisimo; went to bars with a wide variety of strange and interesting mixed drinks (If ever in Peru, never, I mean NEVER order the “Machu Picchu”.  It’s absolutely horrible); and tried the famous “adobo” which is a traditional Peruvian meal of slow-cooked pork in a chili-type sauce (that’s the best description I can muster).  It is only served on Sundays and is the thing all the locals talk about.  Rob said it was pretty good.  I ended up eating a loma saltado meal which is pretty much stir-fry chicken served on a bed of french fries.  Ah, I love traveling!  Speaking of adobo…

2 – So this guy (named Carlos, dressed in professional soccer gear, aged in mid 40s) at the adobo place was sitting in a booth across from us, noticed us whities and struck up a conversation.  It was awesome to try out our Spanish with a local!!  He spoke some English and we spoke some Spanish - communication was rough, but somewhat understandable, which led to us understanding that: he was a lawyer, on business from Lima in Arequipa, a member of a Lawyer Country Club, was going to play soccer post-adobo, and wanted us to join.  Here’s one of those situations you encounter while traveling that makes you test your instincts.  Everyone tells you to never go anywhere with a stranger, but this guy seemed so legit and friendly.  Rob and I tried to have the silent conversation that couples have w/o saying anything to figure out what to do.  It went something like: Eyebrow raise = “What do you think?”, Slight shoulder shrug = “I don’t know, you?”, Pursed lip pulled to one side = “Hm.”, Weak smile = “I guess we could go??”

In the end, we decided to trust the guy, and hit the club with him.  Of course, I have never played soccer and Rob hasn’t played since he was 10, but hey, we could figure it out, right?  Right.  We left the eatery with him, while the main waitress flagged me down and in Spanish said to please be careful, watch my stuff, and come back to the restaurant (to make sure we were okay).  One of the lessons we’ve learned in travel is to have faith.  People will take care of you!

So we got in a cab with Carlos, and his girlfriend Marilu joined us.  They were speaking quite fast, and we were trying our best to understand.  We were a bit on edge, but just decided to go with them.  Sure enough, the cab dropped us off at the lawyer Country Club where we got to hang out as special guests and Rob revisited his youth playing some pretty awesome soccer (in Teva sandels, mind you!).  All was well and we had a great time with our new friends.  See, sometimes you just have to have faith in people.

3 – Colca Canyon, which shall be my next blog topic….read on my friends!

The town of Nazca is really only known for one thing - the famous Nazca Lines.  Never heard of it?  We didn’t either until Amy read, “Fingerprints of the Gods” and few years ago.  If you’re interested in a brief overview, check this out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazca_Lines.

To set the scene, think of traveling out to the middle of the desert where it is VERY dry and hot…pretty much Arizona.  Here were there is virtually no rainfall, an ancient civilization felt compelled to draw geoglyphs in the sand.  There are hundreds of figures, but about 10 are the most obvious and well-known: the whale, spider, hummingbird, fish, monkey, and a human figure called "the astronaut" because of the appearance of boot-like shoes and a rounded head.  As with the candelabra we saw Pisco, no one knows exactly when or why they were created or what the symbols mean.  There are many theories, all fun to consider.  Everyone likes a good mystery!  Some say it is a detailed water map, others say they are religious symbols or astronomical representations, and others...aliens!

We splurged (we seem to be doing that a lot!) and booked ourselves two tickets on a small aircraft to get a birds-eye view of the lines.  This is really the only way to see them.  It was a quick trip, but definitely worth it.  Again, we have never seen anything like this.  Check out the pics below, I posted the ones that are the easiest to make out.

After visiting The Lines, we had another day in Nazca, so we decided to visit a museum.  This one was pretty uninteresting at first (although, it would have been an anthropologist’s dream!), since it was pretty much a museum explaining a series of archeological digs – a bit on the dry side – until, we entered the part of where they displayed all their findings.  This museum had pottery from 2000 years ago.  Some of the pottery had representations of people of different ethnicities.  This was shocking.  Haven’t we heard that these people had no contact with other societies, especially before the Spanish came, yet here in this pottery are not just brown faces, but black, tan, and white faces too.  There are also several pieces depicting what is clearly a man of Asian descent, with Asian features and a thin, long mustache.  This means that either they had contact with these people or knew about them somehow.  We kinda didn't know what to think.  Our minds were blown.  There is so much we don't know about what happened in the past!  The mystery deepens!

So, a little apology my friends.  Blogging while traveling is difficult business, so just as in India, we are way behind on blog posts.  However, I will continue to post them and hope you'll still enjoy reading them knowing that we are safely back in The States.  Oh yea, we're back in The States.  We're in Las Cruces right now visiting friends and family.  This weekend we'll be heading to a cabin in NM for a little retreat before we go back to reality and head to Columbus.  I intend to get this blog caught up to present time, and keep it updated as we continue our adventures.  Thank you for your patience!  With that said, here's the latest blog post - Enjoy!

Our next stop after Pisco – ICA!  Which we pretty much waived hello to and then headed straight for Huacachina, a tourist haven nestled between sand dunes about 40 miles across and 300 feet high (that’s our guess, which could be wildly inaccurate, but just visualize sands dunes as far as the eye can see!).  This city’s biggest tourist thing is four-wheeling through the dunes and sandboarding down the slopes.  Amy about peed her pants just thinking of it (she’s not the most adventurous gal), but she got over herself and one fine evening we decided to check it out.  Our description wouldn’t possibly capture this experience.  It was SO fun and quite the adrenaline rush.  Some of the drivers are crazy!!  Ours, thankfully, was just the right amount of crazy to make the experience fun, but not scary.  And the sand-boarding was pretty awesome, which is saying a lot since Amy strongly dislikes anything related to snowboards (bad experience at Killington, Vermont one year), but the dunes where so high that most amateurs couldn’t actually go down standing up.  We all went down on our bellies.  FUN!!  Unfortunately, we don’t have any pictures of this, since we didn’t want to ruin our camera with sand.

At this point in our Peruvian adventure, we started to discover a little pattern with flying objects and Amy’s right eyeball.  Apparently, her eyelashes appear to be a runway for flies, gnats, and other flying things to park on.  At least once a day, she had some little guy fly directly at her eye.  A couple of times, she closed her eye quickly and caught them in her eyelashes.  This is not fun, folks!  Of course Rob started laughing everytime this would happen, because it’s like all these flies went and told their friends about Amy.  As you can expect, she started wearing sunglasses a lot more.

The day after sandboarding, we did a little wine tour to some nearby wineries.  Southern Peru is known for its fine grape-growing climate and making the countries best wines and Pisco (a brandy liquor).  Our verdict: Peru, drop the wine, stick to the Pisco!

Our last day in this area, we headed into town (Ica) to visit a museum that our Lonely Planet raved about.  We like museums; we’re totally those people.  This museum was pretty quaint, but totally blew our minds.  The museum was robbed back in 2004 where some of the most ancient weavings were stolen.  We learned that, sadly, ancient art robbery is quite a booming profession.  Despite this, their collection is still pretty impressive.  It is mostly of the Paracas and Nazca civilizations, which is pre-Incan, we’re talking 500 B.C.E.!  The most striking thing was the last room of the museum which houses several full mummies, skulls, and even a mummified macaw (complete with feathers!).  The bodies were preserved so well, that some of them still had skin and hair.  The skulls were also mind-blowing.  Did you know that these ancient people were obsessed with perfecting their appearance just like we are today?  We like to shave ourselves, dye our hair, have plastic surgery, etc.; they liked to shape people's heads.  They thought that head shape was the most beautiful and distinguished thing.  The upper classes of this society practiced head deformation, where they wrapped the head and used contraptions to shape the head from the time of birth.  The most common shape was elongated (think coneheads, but flat on top).  We were truly speechless.  We’ve never seen anything quite like it.  We felt like we literally had stepped back in time with all these bodies.  We weren’t able to take pictures, but we’ve posted a picture from the web to give you the idea of what we saw.

So, at this point, we were really beginning to get a glimpse of ancient Peru.  Now for some REAL mysteries…the Nazca Lines!

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