Entrance to La Compaņa Click here to see more photos

Arequipa is a fairly nice town with quite a few sights. Just to see the many houses and churches made out of Sillar (a volcanic white rock) are worth the journey. In the streets surrounding the Plaza de Armas it is possible to find many of these houses. La Compaņa - a church - has got a huge decorated entrance gate and in Calle San Francisco is a bank with some patios that are all magnificently decorated. Furthermore the location of the city is remarkable. Two massive volcanoes are towering above it that can be seen from almost everywhere in the city. Countless Touragencies are trying to sell the view from the volcanoes onto the city - two days Misti (one of the volcanoes) climb...
For us there were two main attractions in Arequipa. One was the Convent Santa Cathalina and the other the museum about the Inca mummies, which is housing the mummie Juanita as well when she is not on one of her journeys around the world. This mummie was discovered high up on a volcanoe in the ice only in 1996 and is now conserved in a freezer to be able to show it to the following generations. The history of all these mummies - there were several found on a volcanoe near Chivay - is very interesting. Burial objects are on exhibition as well which were found next to the mummies. Partly they are very fine and detailed works. They have tiny Llama figures made of silver or gold and pottery with lots of decoration.
In the convent Santa Cathalina one can find all the architectual styles that had occured since the founding of the convent. Most of the courtyards and little streets are nicely decorated and colorfully painted. The many tiny flats of the nuns had different things on exhibition. But most of the time the kitchens were in best shape.
What we found hard in Arequipa was to find local food. Too many of the restaurants gather for tourist and serve really badly or not at all spiced Lasagne, Spaghetti, Hamburgers etc. Furthermore it was hard to find useful information about trekking in the Colca Canyon. One Problem was that everbody just wanted to sell their tour to the canyon; tours that did not even have their own transport but took the public buses in the middle of the night! The other problem was that every information we got was totally different from another, so after asking three different people we would not know what to trust anymore...
In the end we were heading to the supposedly second deepest Canyon of the world without a tour to discover it by foot on our own.