foolfillment: the blog

Something I meant to write about for the last entry was how guilty we felt about our tipping. We had gone to a restaurant for dinner (set menu for about ?1 including a Pisco Sour) where there was a band playing traditional music - pan pipes and the like. As we were leaving one of them came over with his hat, rather obviously asking for our money, not really knowing what to do we threw some change in, it wasn’t until we got back to the hotel that we realised we’d left something like 2p - more of an insult than a tip. Tipping is such an akward thing anyway but when you’re using a strange bunch of coins, you were put on the spot suddenly and you’re not feeling great what more are you expected to do? Anyway, probably worked out in the end with the amount we gave other people who pestered us, we found it really difficult to say no. Now onto the next morning:

Feeling better we got back on the bus and drove our way through the canyon with it’s incredible terracing, stopping off at places along the way to find out more about Incan/Peruvian history, like the places where bodies had been ‘buried’ high up on the cliffs with their possessions, in the foetal position no less. Of course these graves are only know about because they’d been robbed later. Moving on we got to the bit that most people come on these trips for - the condors. These are incredible birds, the biggest in the world with a 3.2 metre wingspan, and to see them soaring on the thermals was a truly amazing sight.

There are three icons of the Incan empire - the serpent, the condor and the puma. Condors are only found in a few places in the world and this is because in the other places where they used to be native the nests were getting raided by pumas. We made our way back to Arequipa, this time along the usual route as the strikes were off, going passed signs warning of llama, similar to the ones warning of cows

This entry was posted at 5:27 pm on the 7th of November, 2005 and is filed under Peru, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.