Saturday, November 1: Colca Canyon and Arequipa

The good news is that Liz was feeling better in the morning! She wasn't nearly 100%, but it was better than she had been the day before, and was at least capable of enjoying the day. She did go through several more packages of Halls, but at least she didn't feel like death at this point. (She said that the yesterday was the 2nd most miserable day of her life, next to the day she was in labor with Claire.) We had our breakfast and prepared our bags for the return journey. As we expected, we would need to ascend the mules, since Liz wasn't feeling up to climbing on foot. This was really disappointing for Liz since she had been doing a lot of training to be able to manage the hike at the high elevation while pregnant. I decided to go by mule as well. I'm sure I could have managed on foot, but decided it would be better for our marriage to go up with Liz. Hans walked, but he kept up a pretty impressive pace, only finishing about 20 minutes after we did.

Riding the mules was certainly easier on our weary legs than walking and provided an unplanned adventure to our tip, but it was nerve-wracking at times. They were pretty fearless about heights, and got what seemed to us to be dangerously close to the edges at times. However, each time it seemed like we were about to fall into the canyon, they turned up the next switchback and continued unabated. Some of the mules were competitive: my mule passed up another as soon as it found a chance. The order changed several times. For a good stretch of the ascent, the mule in front of me kept farting, and I got to be just downwind of it. How lovely.

At the top, we posed for some pictures overlooking the canyon. We forgot to get a photo with our mules, unfortunately. There were a lot of other tourists there, most of whom weren't staying at Sangalle with us. Almost all of them were from North America or Europe, and all of them had hiked up the canyon. We felt pretty lame coming up on the mules. Hans reunited with us here, and led us to a place in Cabanaconde where we had a second breakfast and got WiFi access. After a leisurely break, we met up with our van, which took us down the same road to return us to Arequipa. We were in the van with a different set of tourists this time, these ones from Canada. Liz kept on passing gas in the van without realizing that they were actually smelling pretty bad, since she was stuffed up at the time. We had a good laugh about that later.

We had a few stops along the way. One of them was the thermal pools of La Calera, which we got access to. Liz and I decided to enjoy the waters there, and we're glad we did. It was a short, relaxing stay in the pools there. Hans took advantage of the time to take a nice, long shower. The water was warm, but not hot. That was okay, since the weather was pretty warm anyway. We tried to stay under the canopies. There were a lot of people there, and we ended up having to go to the shallower pool because that was the only one we could find a place to sit. As far as I could tell, we were the only foreign tourists there - most of the other clients were locals. Maybe the nicer hot springs a bit further up had more tourists, but we didn't want to walk that far (and we're pretty comfortable around the locals anyway).

Onward to Chivay, we stopped at the same hostel we went to yesterday and had our lunch there. This was a buffet, with a variety of Peruvian standards available to us (and some desserts, and chicha morada - I probably should have tried this, but I didn't. Now I'll never know if I like it). We returned to the van and had a few stops on our way to Arequipa. I don't remember the name of one place (I'm sure it's written in our original journal that was lost) but it had a lot of shops, a church, and we tried some interesting foods. One was the juice of a local fruit that was very tangy, but unfortunately I don't remember what it was called. At another stop, Liz and I tried a tuna fruit. I later learned that this is the fruit of a prickly pear cactus. It has a mild, pleasant flavor.

Going further, the weather got a bit worse, and it actually began to snow. There was no real danger of the snow accumulating, but it was cold and windy, and the snow was flurrying. We passed by a large group of alpacas, who didn't seem to mind the snow. We took a few photos and moved on.

The weather had calmed down by the time we returned to Arequipa. We bade farewell to Hans and gave him a nice tip. It was good to meet him, and we're glad that we got to speak to him mostly in Spanish. He's a nice guy. We wish we could have been more "fun" for him but Liz really was just feeling awful most of the time. We went back to our hotel and retrieved our bags, and checked in to our room. We spent a good chunk of the remainder of our evening hanging out in our hotel, though we ventured out to have dinner at a crepe restaurant. We had sandwiches and a dessert crepe, and splurged and got lemonade to drink. Even for being one of the more expensive meals of our trip, it was still pretty cheap when factoring in the exchange rate.

We didn't stay much later than that, since we had a flight in the morning. We dropped by the Plaza de Armas one more time on our way back to the hotel so that Liz could enjoy it in better health than before, and then proceeded back to our hotel for the night.