Arequipa

To try and catch the blog up with myself I have to leave some things out. At first I was going to treat Arequipa this way, but there are a couple of things worthy of mention.

The day-pack strap that almost came off the morning I left for the jungle has been fixed. I found a shoe repair shop where one man and three women were clustered beyond the counter. Could they repair my pack? Of course. The suggestion was that nothing could be simpler. "When will it be ready?" I held my breath. If the answer is Friday week ... "At 5:30." That was 25 minutes. It was a super job and it cost me a massive 3 soles ($1.30).

There is a small and relatively expensive museum in the city essentially for one exhibit. There are guides fluent in various languages. They are not included in the admission fee and expect a tip. The tour starts with a National Geographic film about the discovery of an Inca mummy at the top of a nearby volcano. The film suffers from typical US overstatement but between it and the museum tour you get a clear picture of what was going on.

The Incas were not like the Aztecs and Mayas, who practiced human sacrifice regularly. For the Incas it was a rare event to placate especially angry gods in the event of natuaral disasters such as volcanic eruptions. Very few sacrifices have been discovered, five of them on this particular active volcano and all of them children.

The one at the very top of the mountain, known as Juanita, is the most famous. The procedure started in Cusco, where many llamas were sacrificed. The party of priests, Juanita and followers would then have walked all the way to the mountain and climbed to a peak over 6,000m above sea level. The final ceremony would probably have been at dawn. Science has established that Juanita was given a drink of chicha, a kind of maize beer, as a last meal. She would have been extremely cold and at least half drunk. She wouldn´t have felt a thing.

The final exhibit in the museum is Juanita herself, remarkably well preserved. She was offered to the gods and the Incas believed that she would thereafter live with them, achieving a kind of deification herself. Her discovery certainly passed a lot of information from the time of the Incas to the present.