Kelly's Visit Number Two

The Gringo Couple at Colca Canyon

Kelly came for her second visit a couple weeks ago, mostly to help me celebrate my 25th birthday. As if her coming here wasn't a good enough birthday present, she treated me with a vacation to Arequipa, Peru, a beautiful Andean city (and the second-largest city in Peru) surrounded by snow-capped volcano/mountain peaks in the far south. After a couple nights in Lima and my work site, we jumped on a 12 hour, bus for an overnight trip through the mountains to Arequipa. Comfortable, fully reclining seats (called bus cama) usually make sleeping easy, but, like on my Easter trip to Ayacucho, another zig-zag trip full of hairpin turns kept my body from laying still and me from sleeping deeply.

Arequipa Plaza and Church at Night

Our first day in Arequipa was a lazy one. I was tired from the bus ride, Kelly was tired from 3 straight days of travel, and, at almost 8,000 feet, we were both adjusting to the thin air. We checked into our hostel, an old, colonial style mansion, slept, ate, and drank some of city's very own beer, called what else? Arequipeña. We both enjoyed it, but my initial reaction was that it tasted like Natural Ice while Kelly thought it was similar to Heineken. Hm? Unfortunately, it isn't sold outside in other parts of Peru. Los ariquipeños, as people from the area are called, maintain a sense of superiority, thinking of themselves as separate from and better than the rest of the country. They're sort of of like the Texas of Peru, but not. They have cleaner streets, less stray dogs, more money, alpaca hair (mmm...soft), issue their own Arequipan passports as a joke, and make their own beer but refuse to sell it to others.

Volcanoes Outside the City

We spent three total days in the city, walking around, trying the food (rocoto relleno, hot peppers, stuffed with seasoned beef, cheese, and onions was a favorite) and drink, and visiting local hotspots. Early in the trip, before we'd tired of being tourist mode, we checked out an ancient, pristine convent that offered as many photo opportunities as it did creepy stories (nuns not allowed to pass beyond the walls). Later we made our way to the huge, smelly market, where we found everything from puppies to goat heads for sale.

View From Inside the Convent

"Goat Heads! Get Your Goat Heads!"

Later we visited Colca Canyon, an immense canyon twice as deep as the Grand Canyon that lies about 100 miles northwest of Arequipa. Colca Canyon has been in the news lately because a Peruvian man has gone missing there after venturing into the canyon with his wife over a month ago. After the woman resurfaced a few weeks ago, there have been rumors that she pushed him over a cliff edge. We didn't descend into the canyon but rather traveled up and up, at one point over 16,000 feet, to look down upon it from it's rim. The scenery and environment were pretty incredible. Huge condors and the biggest hummingbirds I've ever seen before (3 times the size of a normal one) were flying around an amazing backdrop of mountains and canyons. The air was thin, though neither of us got sick. Between water, altitude medicine, and coca leaves, the worst that happened was Kelly going pee every 10 minutes. Compared to the Peruvian couple, I'd say we did alright.

Condor Coasting over Canyon

Me and the Canyon

¡ Strike !

Been busy the last few weeks with work and fun, both of which have kept me MIA on the blog. I'll write this post and another to rehash happenings over the last weeks, and then things should get back to my post-per-week(ish) schedule. Today's post covers Mother's Day and the recent Cotton Workers' strike. The next post will cover Kelly's visit and the vacation we took to celebrate my birthday.

Mother's Day

Mother's Day is a much bigger deal here than in the US. Traditional gender roles are the norm here in rural Peru, where girls become mothers before they become women and, as lifelong housewives, get little respect from their husbands. Drinking, cheating, and beating are common. They may get neglected 364 days a year, but mothers sure live it up on their day.

My host aunt, who works for the Municipality, was put in charge of food (mothers cook on mother's day) for the town's Mother's Day celebration. The pot of stewing meat in the photo above was one of 15+ pots cooking outside my bedroom window all day. I've never seen so much food before. The food was delicious and we had leftovers, but it took us three days to get through all the meat and beans.

Workers picking out the bad cotton on
a normal day at the processing plant

Then the Cotton Strike started. After cotton prices dropped more 2/3 in value, from about 270 Nuevo Soles/unit to 90/unit ($US90 to $30), the workers refused to sell their cotton to the local processing plants, who were partially responsible for lowering the prices to these laughable levels. The people stopped selling, they stopped picking, they stopped going to the fields altogether. Instead, they went to the closest highway, threw down rocks, thorny bushes, and whatever else that could be used to stop traffic. When more than half of ALL workers in the district are cotton workers, that's a lot of protestors and a big problem for travelers and commerce that depends on transportation. Taxi drivers had no customers. Non-agricultural workers couldn't get to their jobs. Semis couldn't get their loads delivered on time. Children couldn't get to school.

Kids on the blocked highway.
I got rocks thrown at me for taking photos.

Cars were nowhere to be found and children were running litter-riddled highways like a scene from some post-apocalyptic movie. Even the Pan-American Highway, the nearly 30,000 mile-long roadway that connects North, Central, and South America, was shutdown. It it was hilarious until Strike Day 3, when I had to go pick up Kelly from the airport in Lima and taking the Pan-American was the only way to get to there. But there was hope. I had seen people drive around the barricades (where there were no cotton workers to threaten the passers-by). Also, the roads were supposedly only blocked during the daytime, and opened up again during the evening and early morning hours.

Fires were set

And so I left my site at 6 AM, hoping to pass the strike zones before rocks were placed for the day and things got clogged up again. I ran into problems right away. More than 5 miles of the Pan-American was lined with big vehicles at a complete standstill. Semi-trucks, tourist buses, and other vehicles not small enough to drive on the slim shoulder sat for who-knows-how-long with their engines off. Unable to pass this mess in the van I'd been riding in, I started walking. After maybe a mile I caught a small cab that rode the shoulder, off-roaded, and took me as far as they could go until we were stopped at a bridge by a man with a machete and a strong belief in the workers' struggle. We offered money to pass, like we had to all the others before, but he refused. The story goes on, but with more walking and small cabs is too long and unexciting to continue here. I will say that it ends on a happy note. I eventually got to Lima and the airport in time for Kelly's arrival and the cotton workers saw prices rise again.