The White City — Arequipa, Peru
What I did
Zig Zag Restaurant
Crepisimo Restaurant
We dragged ourselves out of bed at 8am this morning to avail of the breakfast that was included in our rate - we shouldn't have bothered - it was the most measly breakfast ever - stale white bread, jam, juice, tea and coffee. If the breakfast is going to be so stingy it'd be better to just not provide it at all!
Our other complaint was that the bathroom had totally flooded again overnight, making the room absolutely stink. We possibly could have asked to move to a different room today but it seemed like too much hassle so we just made do with it. On the positive side, the hostel is smack bang in the center of Arequipa so in 60 seconds we were in in the Plaza de Armas, looking for somewhere to have a proper breakfast.
Arequipa is Peru's second biggest city, with a population of over a million (quite a bit smaller than Lima's 7 to 8 million) and at an altitude of 2,350m.
We had to spend some time this morning planning where we're going next and what we want to do in Arequipa. The biggest tourist attraction here is the Colca Canyon, about 3 hours away by bus. Generally people do a 2 or 3 day hike to properly appreciate the Canyon which is the second deepest in the world and twice the depth of the Grand Canyon. It is also a great place for seeing condors. We had originally planned to do a 3 day hike in the canyon but after the Inca trail and our time in Huaraz we were all hiked out, and just couldn't manage to get ourselves psyched about it. We also had been lucky enough to spot a condor on the Inca trail so that didn't draw us to it. We weighed up the pros and cons and ultimately decided that there are other treks and tours that we are more excited about in Bolivia, Argentina and Chile, so to save our money for those. The trips to the Colca Canyon, like everything else in Peru, do not come cheap.
We spent some time visiting the Monasterio de Santa Catalina, a really interesting convent that back in the day was inhabited by rich nuns who had servants and regularly had feasts and parties! In the 1800's they got found out, after 3 centuries of decadence, and were forced to live the life of normal nuns. The monastery is a 20,000square meter city within the city. Definitely was worth a visit.
Afterwards, still feeling a bit sorry for ourselves after yesterdays All-Ireland defeat, we decided to treat ourselves to a nice lunch in a restaurant rated no 1 on trip-adviser. John had melt-in-the-mouth Argentinian steak on a hot stone and Róisín had beef/lamb/alpaca meatballs, followed by a delicious nougat with Peruvian amazonian nuts! We also treated ourselves to a nice bottle of wine. We spent half the afternoon here, eating and drinking, and amazed that we had happened across such a delicious restaurant.
For tea we visited the sister restaurant, Crepisimo, where we had some tasty crepes.
Around 7pm Róisín got a text from Bank of Ireland saying that there were 2 transactions on our credit card, of different amounts, and to text back whether they were our transactions our not. We had withdrawn money in Lima the previous day - 3 withdrawals each of the same amount and nothing for 2 weeks prior to that, so we were certain that these 2 different transactions were not ours. We texted BOI to say this and they texted back to phone them. O2 do not have an agreement with the phone network in Peru so our phones cannot make phonecalls. At this point we thought that our card had definitely been skimmed and someone was currently on a spending spree. As we have loaded money into the card to avoid paying cash advance fees, it means that if money is stolen from the card it is not insured by the credit card company. And as we didn't want to be bankrupted we had no choice but to skype Róisíns parents to ask them to phone BOI and get them to ring us.
A few minutes later a guy from BOI rang us - it turns out that the 2 transactions that we were texted about happened over 2 weeks ago!!! And they were our transactions. Seriously! Talk about incompetence - we just couldn't believe it, and to make things worse, the idiot from BOI didn't seem to think it was unusual to text us in the middle of the night about transactions from that long ago. You wouldn't want to be relying on these guys to alert us if there actually was any suspicious activity - imagine the damage someone could do with our card for 2 whole weeks. Well the guy got a right earful - firstly about the cost of receiving the call here (over €6) and secondly about the fact that we had to wake Róisíns parents. When we got off the phone we had a great laugh about it, purely at the absurdity of it.