Arequipa, Part 2

First off, thanks for the comments and emails, we love hearing from you!

Wednesday we woke up, took nice hot showers (we could get spoiled, we hear in Bolivia that they aren't as common) and started our day. We decided to do some sightseeing around the city. First stop, the Santa Catalina Monastery.

According to our guidebook, it was a place that wealthy girls moved to when they turned 18 so they could be taken care of for the rest of their lives and live the way that wealthy girls were supposed to. It made sound as though it was some kind of House of Ill Repute and that the Catholic Church did not have too much control over.

The monastery itself is huge, it takes up an entire city block. There are a number of large courtyards, a couple galleries filled with paintings of Catalina and other important people from the monstery. A larger room for some of the girls to bunk in and a ´bathing area` that looked more like a swimming pool. The dining room came complete with a pulpit. There are many rooms all over the grounds for all the women who had some kind of leadership position in the monastery. Some had private kitchen areas, most had private fireplaces, all had private altars.

The grounds were pretty amazing. All the bedroom areas had ceilings but since the weather here is so moderate, most other areas did not have a roof. It was pretty neat to see the channels built into the ground for the water runoff. There were gardens and planters just about everywhere, which was very beautiful.

Yesterday we took our whitewater rafting trip, it was really great.
We were picked up at our hostel at 9am by our safety kayak guide Gustavo and our raft guide Frank, and went on to pick up the 4 other rafters. We drove through town to get our boat and gear and a bumpy 25 minute ride later we arrived to the Chili River. No joke, that´s the name and thankfully for gear we recived a wetsuit top and bottom, helmet, shoes and lifejacket... the water was freezing!

Next up we were given our instructions. Forward! Backward! Stop! Get down (in the boat)! Positions (back out onto the sides of the boat)! Frank also explained that we were going to go down rapids up to class 4. Yikes! Did I mention this was my first time and Erin´s second?? After a few games on dry land we were ready!

The trip was awesome. The water cold. Erin and I agreed how weird that we seemed like the only ones that were paying attention when it came to paddling and paddling right. The British girls on board, were nice but didn´t quite get the cue to paddle and the other two people never seemed to get the idea of paddling in synch. No big deal though, we made it! Gustavo was the safety guide/cameraman. Every so often we´d pause at the top of a set of rapids, wait for him to get into position and then we´d go down so he could take pictures. Toward the end we wondered what would happen if someone did fall out and our safety guide was out of his boat shooting pics... but thankfully we stayed in the boat.

By far the best part was going down the class 4 rapids. There were actually 2 sets, the first set we had to get out and walk down the bank while Gustavo took his kayak and Frank bravely took the boat by himself. The second one, was all ours.

Erin and I were in front and unfortunaltey don´t remember all of it since we both had our eyes shut going down, but that´s irrelevant. We screamed, shut our eyes, opened our mouths screaming and enjoyed it!

Overall the trip down the river was 1hr 45 minutes with a water and chocolate break in between. (Rafting is hard work! Not really but I wanted to make it sound like we earned the choclolate:)It was so much fun and we cannot wait to do it again. Did I mention that Erin wants to be a rafting guide someday? Cause she does. One of her many plans!

Erin and I also decided to do some dancing at Dejavù last night. That was a blast! It was our first night out on the town. We've been too exhausted most nights, but we promised ourselves to go out at least once in Arquipa. There was a live band playing traditional latin music, plenty of locals to show us the moves, and even more cerveza Arequipeña flowing.
On to Nasca!