Arequipa, Peru

Arequipa looks like quite a green city here, but don’t been fooled. Aside from an agricultural strip alongside the Rio Chili, a few terraces and some trees in the city, Arequipa’s surrounding landscape is extremely arid. It’s effectively desert during the long dry season, with very scarce groundwater and lots of scrub and cactus.

The Plaza de Armas and its stunning cathedral are the city’s spiritual and cultural heart. It’s a place where families congregate on Sunday afternoons, where tourists shoot selfies and eat ice creams, shoe shiners run their stalls and people sell churros, postres and balloons.

Much of the old city is built from a volcanic ignimbrite, known locally as sillar. It’s a relatively easily worked rock – a bit like extra dense pumice – which has allowed for lots of intricately carved facades, pillars and arches.

Volcan Misti is the icon of the city and a skyline of which the locals are very proud. Just over 5800m it’s a very popular ascent by tourists during the dry season.

Knowing we’d be in the city for at least two months we didn’t want to loose all our hard earned fitness. Arequipa may not be the trail riding capital of the world, but with a bit of exploring and looking at Strava’s heat map we figured out a good area to ride in that was close to the city and ended up going there a lot. Here’s our favourite two hour ride. We also went out on two Sundays with the local mountain bike club. This was usually a group of 20-30 people of all ages and abilities; they made us feel very welcome.

One of the nice things about our ride near the city was that there was a virtually traffic free route to reach it (impressive for a city of 1 million) and it took us into such starkly different surrounds to that of the city centre. Lava flows, singletrack along the edge of a canyon and loads of cactus made it a pretty special area. And the odd thing is we rarely saw anybody else up there.

There was often something going on in the city: usually religious festivals, but sometimes other sorts of gatherings of police or military. Usually accompanied by a brass band and lots of fanfare. One day we found ourselves in the middle of an inter-village dance competition, where people from the indigenous villages dress up in their special traje and dance block after block through the city.

The quarry where the sillar that is used for the construction of the city comes from is an interesting place to visit, with a small section of carved rock. This ignimbrite would have poured from Volcan Chachani as a pyroclastic flow during one of its massive eruptions. Now all is quiet except for the the sound of the chipping and splitting of rock as families and work teams toil here making a cruder version of the blocks for cheap housing and walls.

Julio, his wife Anna and their sons are canteros, quarrying rock from the walls of the canyon and shaping it into blocks. This family produces about 10 blocks a day, which sell for 5 soles each (NZ$2.40). It’s a rough and harsh working environment, with searing sun, loose rock everywhere and risk of collapse of blocks from the quarry wall. The family split large blocks with hand tools, and then work them down to a standard size. Julio used plastic bags as ‘gloves’ to stop his skin splitting, but it was still in quite a bad way and we ended up dressing the cuts for him with our first aid kit.

Compared with smaller towns and cities in Peru, Arequipa does not have a particularly indigenous feel. You don’t see many people in traditional dress. But it is common to see people dressed in their traditional clothes for the tourists. Women often bring lambs or baby alpacas into the city so they can pose for the classic Peru cliche shot for a sole or two.

This city rewards the curious and some of the cloisters and courtyards you can explore beside the biggest churches and oldest buildings are just remarkable.

The chapel of San Ignacio, adjacent to the Iglesia de la Compañia, is intricately decorated with paintings and jungle-themed murals featuring flowers and tropical birds – a reminder of Peru’s incredible diversity and is a little pocket of the Amazon here in the desert.

The bank-sponsored Christmas tree in the Plaza de Armas was gaudy, but it looked awesome in combination with Arequipa’s amazing sunsets. These epic sunsets lasted until early January, when it started to be more consistently cloudy as the wet season started. Immediately after New Years there were some big protests in the plaza. They were non-violent, but accompanied by a lot of riot police on standby. The issue, as it often is in Latin America was corruption and lack of accountability by politicians and civic leaders.

Cyclist company came to Arequipa just before Christmas and it was great to have Patrick and Ratna to hang out with over Christmas and New Years. We first met this German/Indonesian couple on the Dalton Highway in Alaska and then again in Oaxaca, Mexico. They’re also biking the length of the Americas, but seasonal challenges and a couple of trips home have meant their trip has been in blocks and sometimes northbound instead of southbound. At the moment they are filling in gaps in Chile before flying to Bogota to ride north and then complete Central America. After that they’ll be finished. Patrick is a dedicated photographer and you can follow these guys on IG,  or here at Facebook.

Patrick and Ratna left Arequipa shortly after NY to ride east-bound on the southern leg of the route we rode and mapped on our way back from Bolivia. We rode with them for the first few hours out of the city. Sadly they ran into terrible weather once on the altiplano so rode to Copacabana on the pavement quick as they could.

We left Arequipa having made some great friends. Bruno is a local bicycle enthusiast with a big bike collection including cargo bikes, single speeds and a Surly Troll. He works as a doctor for mining companies so is away from the city for a couple of weeks at a time. Bruno helped us out by receiving some packages in Arequipa and took us out on the local epic ride shortly after we arrived in the city. The 85km Vuelta de los Pueblitos is a classic with 0ver 1500 metres of climbing and lots of dirt roads. It came out later that he’d planned to kick our arses, but with us suddenly sans-luggage and with about 12 billion extra red blood cells from all the riding over 4000m he had no chance!

Before we left Arequipa we hung out with Bruno and Claudia (below) many more times, including a couple more great bike rides. Claudia’s also big on bikes and runs a cool cafe/bike accessory shop called La Cleteria. Through Bruno and Claudia we were also introduced to Edgar, another proud Surly owner. Edgar has quite a story: he used to be a super keen racer type and occasional cycle tourist, but discovered while while riding through Mexico nine years back that he had leukaemia. The intervening time has been a period of struggle and recovery, and while he says he’s a shadow of his former self, he’s out on a bike again.

Bruno and Claudia are also the energy and masterminds behind Arequipa’s Masa Critica (critical mass) events. These mass-turnout rides take place at night once a month, on a loop between 15-20km long. Critical Mass is a worldwide movement, held in many big cities, to raise awareness of cyclists and cycling and their requirements that should be allowed for in town planning. I’d never actually been one before (despite having been a cycling enthusiast since my teens), but in Arequipa we attended three. The crew do a fantastic job organising these. Bruno does an amazing job rallying people and leads from the front. It was inspiring to watch. The neat thing to see was that even in conservative Arequipa there was a turnout each time of between 100-200 people, and from all walks of life and on all kinds of bikes.

For such a long stay we had thought we’d find an apartment or Air B&B for a good weekly rate, but in the end Misti B&B hostel (2 mins from Plaza de Armas) came to the party with a very good rate. We really liked it there: the staff were friendly, the sunset view was amazing (above – with the neighbour’s courtyard) and we were there long enough we felt part of the family. Their daughter Nicolle (below) became so familiar with us she used to come and hang out in our room, and the neighbour’s cute dog Augusto came to play sometimes too (when he wasn’t barking at nothing or chasing his tail). Some of the kitchen and and cleaning staff were Venezuelan. Yuny, the breakfast cook, had a very sad story of joining the exodus from Venezuela in search of a better life. She left with her son, but was robbed twice by the military en route, losing all her cash savings.

I’ll post later to update about our time in Cusco so far, but for now the 10 week break is over and we’re off tomorrow for 5-6 weeks of adventure before we come back to Cusco.