After our 12 hour over night bus, we arrived into Arequipa at 6.30am....at an increased altitude of 2328m. We got to our hostel and somehow resisted the urge to have a nap!!! Instead we went for a wander around the old part of Arequipa and then met up with Pat and Sophie, some friends from our sailing trip.

Together we headed to the Mueseum Sanctuarios Andinos, to see Juanita, 'the ice princess', who was an Incan maiden sacrifice. She was frozen on top of Ampato Mountain and is almost perfectly preserved. The tour involved a documentary by National Geographic of when they found her body, and the others, then there was displays of the artefacts from the area....the climax of the tour was Juanita herself....cased inside a freezing display cabinet!!! She is a bit creepy as she is TINY, but also has her hair, fingernails etc!!!

After taking in a bit more of the city, we booked a tour to Colca Canyon the next morning. This is 4160 meters deep, which is more than twice as deep as the Grand Canyon. We shopped around the get the best value we could, knowing that we have an expensive couple of weeks coming up!

The next morning we were picked up and begun our journey to Chivay, inside the Colca Canyon....this is the first tour we have done which made us feel like the yanks on the paddy wagons around Killarney!!!..It was very much get off, take a picture, get back on, next place...repeat!!!!

We were going to hit 4910meters high, therefore the guide showed us how to use cooca leaves correctly, in order to combat altitude sickness. This is what the local chew on all the time to combat the effects. Even though she gave us the ones with the sweet rock in the middle they were very disgusting....they numb your mouth like you are in the dentist....needless to say we weren't investing in any ourselves at this point!!! We had however bought the caramel sweet version of it, which weren't too bad at all!!!

On the drive to the summit we stopped to see llamas, alpacas and vicunas, all of which are in our pictures! As we approached the summit there was a slight sprinkle of snow...not that you would know it looking at Shane in his flip flops and shorts!!!! From here you can see 8 volcanos, including the one where Juanita was found. We ended the day in Chivay, a small town about 3300m above sea level in the Canyon. There wasn't too much to do here, apart from visit the hot springs. So we had a nice relaxing couple of hours in these nice toasty pools. The final part of the package tour was an evening of entertainment!!!..Making us feel even more like those yanks.....we got a set meal and then there was various traditional dancing and music to entertain us for the evening!

The following morning we left the hostel at 6am to get out to see the condors early....well at least that's what we thought the idea was....instead we got taken to 2 villages along the way, for pictures of churches and more traditional dancing around a fountain at 6am!!!....it seems everyone is out to get what money they can, charging for all pictures!!!

Eventually we were heading to see the condors....the guide spotted one so we all jumped out to get pictures and see these birds up close....we were lucky this first one went straight over our heads several times. We then continued towards Cruz del Condor, we stopped just short of it and walked the last part. In total we saw about 8 or 9 condors so we were pretty happy as it isn't the best time of year for them. That was about it for the tour, it was just head back along the same road, stopping for a few pictures.

We arrived into Arequipa with a couple of hours to spare before our overnight bus to Cusco. We killed our time in this coffee shop which had the nicest carrot cake....we started off sharing a piece, but that was never going to work so we had one each!!!:)