It took five long days before I finally decided to go visit our second hospital of the trip and after a rather ominous lie down, let us attach these electrodes, and listen while three doctors looked at my little heartbeat line, and occaisionally laughed (I think they were actually secretly talking about football with no nurses nearby to scold them) I had the altitude sickness prognosis confirmed. I was quite concerned that having got altitude sickness at 2500m there was no way I would be going to 3500-3800m where Cusco, Machu Pichu, La Paz, and pretty much all the rest of Bolivia are, but it seems that with some helpful drugs my body did get around to pumping out more than enough red blood cells to get me back up and going, and I can now proudly climb two flights of steps without needing to hold onto something afterwards.

Luckily Arequipa was quite a decent town to spend a bit of time in, lots of good food, and a few monasteries and museums to poke around in. Notably one museum in town had a whole collection of mummies that had been found near the peaks of near by mountains and we had quite an informative tour about the mummies, which were Incan child sacrifices purportedly for the placation of malevolent volcano deities.

We also visited the much less bloodthirsty Santa Catalina Monastery which was completely closed off to the world for almost 400 years, and housed a succession of extraordinarily wealthy nuns through out the years. Church authorities tried to reform the convent several times taking such extraordinary measures as limiting each nun to one personal servant each. Now days there are still twenty nuns living there in seclusion in the modern wing while the 5 streets of original buildings are open to the public and look quite like picturesque narrow streeted Italian villages.

After I had acquired an adequate number of red blood cells, we jumped in a lovely Mercedes van with a whole bunch of Peruvians, Spaniards, and one english speaking Pole and headed up to Colca Canyon. It get's its name from the wee tomb that the Incans built for some of their leadership way up the side of some reall steep cliffs, but the real draw was just the steep canyon scenery complete with pre-Incan terraces and the Andean Condors who we thought we would miss out on as at the start of our second day we arrived at the the Condor viewing spot to find it completely enshrouded in mist. We did a wee walk through the area and spotted a couple of Andean Rabbits but not a single Condor. We rolled down the canyon and stopped at a lay over rife with hawkers and had a wee look at their wares. Luckily soon after we arrived we spotted a couple of Condors flying down the valley and gradually they came closer and closer until one landed on the rocks near by and another continually buzzed the assembled tourists (probably waiting for one of the assembled tourists to die so they could scavenge them) and even continued to chase our van once we had to hit the road. We also got to enjoy soem hot pools (the rest of the world really doesn't have much geothermal acticity apparently) and the most random of all restaurant cultural music and dance evenings, that culminated with a dance that involved biting a lemon, passing out and being whipped by their dance partner.

Pretty soon after our return from the Canyon we jumped a bus and headed up to Cusco.