Arequipa, Peru

When the small plane lands, we get off like the early days of air travel, down a ladder, onto the tarmac and into the small airport with its one baggage carousel.  We are flying to the sun, to a higher elevation.  “Arequpia, the White City” the sign proclaims.  I feel instantly elated in the way that only traveling does to me.  The city is surrounded by snow capped mountains in the far distance and high, arid desert before that.  The slanted light of morning, like the sweep of a beacon, greets us.   The air seems thin and I check with Juana about the altitude, an ever abiding concern we have about Peru.  “Like Tahoe,” she says and I breathe in slowly.  People are breathing all around us like it is no big deal. 

 I will come to love Arequipa for many reasons, the biggest one perhaps is that it is not overrun with tourists like Cusco and the locals seem to have enough pride or disdain to not bother us every waking minute for a sale.  We tour the Santa Catalina Convent, the touted tourist attraction.  It is billed as a city within a city and indeed it is, still a functioning convent after four hundred years although the nuns have now moved into better quarters in a new structure just next door.  I catch a glimpse of one scurrying down a ladder, fleeing from the sight of the secular world.  The  white volcanic stone has been painted; vast stretches of reddish orange walls are public spaces, while blue interiors carve out the private or sanctified realm.  I spend a lot of time at the convent photographing the light as it sculpts the walls, the arched colummns, the courtyards and the interplay between the worlds.  The convent is like a city of my dreams with its labryinth streets, leading to quiet plazas of fountains, benches and trees.  Arched colonnades define the perimeter of these plazas and these walls, ornately painted with saints and religious scenes.  We are in New Spain, set back in their colonial times, and the uneven cobblestone, the archways, the saturated color, the olive trees, the carefully placed scarlet geraniums that decorate the windows and walls, remind me of where I am most happy.  I imagine myself a sweet-faced nun, a habit outlining my face, an inconvenience for sure, but the promise of security,  privacy and uninterrupted dream time in my little cell supersedes that.  The convent was populated by daughters of the nobility, those in need of refuge.  Their aristrocratic families made sure that it was not a prison but more like a plush, richly decorated spa.  Their daughters were assured a place in the eternal cosmos.  I imagine myself such, a fixed star, twinkling in the surity of the velvet night.  Sor Juana, the title denoting “sister” as in nun,  beckons me to scamper along through the winding streets to the convent’s church and I follow.

Our posada very close to the convent and is built out of the same white sillar stone the Spanish used for all of colonial Arequipa.  Our room has an arched ceiling and a cavelike coolness.  There is a ladder nearby leading up to the sundeck.  We meet an Australian woman up there and are subjected to a long, winding tale of divorce, estrangement and frenetic travels.  Her distress unnerves me and I watch the shadows deepen and sculpt the stones of the buildings to ground myself.  We tell her we must leave to get to our “Menu of the Day” before the restaurants stop serving.  This is the mid-day, Spanish-inspired, three course meal for the equivalent of US $1.75.  These are fancy affairs - cloth napkins, changes of silverware, heavy goblets.  There is a choice of soup, a main dish, a dessert and the ubiquituous ruby colored, fruit infused drink.  We find a restaurant that is grotto-like with mustard walls. It is hard to tear ourselves away from Arequipa.