Arequipa

Taking a super-slow bus from lake Titikaka down to Arequipa, passing the altiplano and entering the land of the canyons. After more than three weeks around 4000 m high, Arequipa almost feels tropical at 2400 meters. la ciudad blanca, the white city with 360 days of sushine and everblue skies received us with rain and clouds for the 6 days of our stay. Nevertheless, it will be one of the highlights of the trip. That is to large extend the "fault" of the casa de melgar hostel. Due to a communication error among their staff, the hostel offered us one of their best rooms, a honeymoon suite about the size of our entire apartment in Cologne, with four meter high ceilings and walls of massive, castle-like volcanic stones inside an old Spanish colonial townhouse for 28 euros a night...which we accepted gladly for three nights, and even managed to convince the hotel to extend another night. Every morning and evening with a big smile, we walked the almost a hundred meters from our cozy realm to the reception, crossing 5(!) interior courts and a flower garden, making every day in Arequipa automatically very special! apart from that, we celebrated halftime of our sabbatical with the excellent Peruvian kitchen,with Arequipa being one of its culinary centers and took a pisco sour mixing class, in order to not repeat the terrible result that we achieved when trying to prepare one for Ulf's family four years ago :-(
In order to not only spend the days sleeping long, enjoying excellent food and prepare drinks, we decided it was time to do some hardcore sports: climbing the Chachani, a 6085 meter high volcano, overlooking the city and the canyon land. at the end, together with a lovely swiss couple, Samuel and Michaela, and Ivan, our mountain guide traveled up to our base camp at 5200 meters, where we all spend half of the night in tents, before starting to attack the summit at 1:00 o'clock in the morning. Isa decided after some climbing, that she would rather go back and wait for the group in the base camp, and also the swiss couple stopped at 5700 meters...kind of sad because it was Samuels plan to propose marriage to Michaela on the summit...but a proposal in the base camp with champaign was almost as nice. so in the end, out of the four, only Ulf arrived at the summit together with the guide. since then, we know, that "one of the easiest" 6000 mountains, does not mean "easy"at all. isa waited in the base camp for the completely exhausted Ulf, who returned after 10 hours from the summit...while she also broke her record, carrying for 5 hours almost 15 kilogram of equipment up to 5200 meters...after that, we slept almost 14 hours in our cozy hotel room.Read more