Trifolium

Arequipa, a dazzling city, built of white granite with elabourite wedding cake churches; city of eternal summer, with only five days of rain a year; a startlingly European city in the midst of the Andes; apparently a centre of right wing politics- not hard to believe as it seems Spanish to the core, and the native population are mainly to be seen trying to sell their goods on street corners. This is a city that bespeaks the wealth and power of the ruling class, its massive cathedral tower over the little people.

We are now on the last leg of our Peruvian tour and have fetched up in this odd but beguiling place. Yesterday we spent a couple of hours wandering round the beautiful and peaceful Santa Catalina monastery, a small town within the town, where the daughters of wealthy and middle class Spaniards "retreated" in the fifteenth century. And who could blame them? What choices were offered them? Get married at 14 or so to a man chosen for dynastic or financial reasons, to be raped on a regular basis and get the chance to die in childbirth? Or go into a convent, and learn to read and write, have your own room with comforts of bed, chamber pot and small kitchen, and have the chance of power and influence as Mother Superior? Would you prefer to have your hand cut off, or not?

Tomorrow we get up at 2.30 am to take a bus to Colca Canyon where we are assured, we will see a some of the remaining few condors in the wild. I expect to be knocked sideways by this, as I have so many other experiences, but will it equal floating down the Rio Momon in the middle of the night, getting a first glimpse of the towering green mountains overlooking Machu Picchu, being hugged by a laughing woman who lives in a hut made of reeds built on a floating island on Titicaca, or even catching sight of the distant snow-clothed mountains of Bolivia across this great, high inland sea? I will let you know in future posts!