Vamos Negro! Afirma! SACALE LA MIERDA! (quote from the bullfights)

My several days in Arequipa quickly turned into several weeks, involving bullfights, guinea pigs, rock climbing, mountaineering, canyoning, dancing, and much more.


Peleadas de Toro (Bullfights)

For Mother's Day, Michel's family decided to do what every good family ought to do. We went to a village to see the Sunday bullfights (Better than Sunday football!!). At the bullfights, the bulls fight each other, the same way they might fight in nature over territory or women. They charge each other with their horns, trading their massive weight back and forth through their heads, until one bull gives in and runs off. These bulls are the family pets and the family pride, carrying charged names ranging from Terror to Talismancito.

There is no separation between the fighting ring and the audience... the audience stands in the dust and flies in a wide circle around the bulls. But around the audience, there is a big plastic wall, to prevent un-paying guests from sneaking in, or perhaps to make terrified evacuation more interesting (dun dun dun!). Two bulls are brought into the ring at a time. The rest are outside in a field, tied to stakes in the ground and bellowing with their tongues out. Sometimes they throw up. They tug at their stakes, wanting to get free. Bulls are normally calm, but these ones are all drugged with adrenaline (or something) to make them more vicious in the fights.

As the bulls push each other around the ring, they sometimes get closer to the audience. The more sober members tense up as the bulls get near. The more drunk members (nearly everyone) do not seem to notice the danger. Some are passed out and have to be woken up by their family members to move out of the way. One old matriarch has to be woken up to receive a trophy -- her bull won one of the fights.

Finally, one bull enters the ring at the peak of its adrenaline drug rush and instead of charging the other bull, it charges toward the audience -- toward us. People run, and it tears down some of the plastic walls. Luckily, the other bull wants in on the action and charges the crazed bull. They fight and push further into the audience. Michel has a great video of people running in terror as the bulls fight where the audience once stood -- but the video is short because then we had to run too.

"I´ve only ever seen an audience member die once," Michel later informs me.

Ampato - Elevation 6,288 m (20,630 ft)

Michel is a mountain guide and he promised we could go on a big mountain together. I picked the biggest one I could find that we could arrange not-too-expensive transport for. How proud I felt to go up a mountain with my good friend, Peru´s "Mountaineer of the Year."

But going up a mountain that tall is a bad idea if you`ve done nothing to get acclimatized. It is also a bad idea if you only got three hours of sleep the night before because you went out dancing until 4:30 in the morning. Needless to say, I felt sick with altitude sickness at around 5,400 m and we decided it was unsafe to continue in my half-fainted state. Another group that went up that same day (they left an hour before us but we quickly caught up to them since they walked so slow!) went a little further than us but decided it unsafe higher up because of avalanche danger -- so I guess even if I hadn´t gotten sick we wouldn´t have gotten much further.

Canyoneering

Some of Michel's friends want to develop for tourism a narrow canyon with a waterfall going through it, so they invited us to check out the canyon with them. We rappelled down (just 20m or so) and landed waste deep in water. We explored the canyon for a while, deciding where to set up more anchors for rappels further down into the canyon -- the idea is that the tourists can rappel all the way down, then walk out of the canyon. But since we didnt have drills to set up the anchors with, we had to climb back out for the day. I learned how to climb a rope using two prussik knots and climbed back out. Julber (one of the friends we went with) is now in Alaska, climbing Mt. McKinley. I learned that he is sort of a hero because he climbed Aconcagua in 16 hours (a feat that takes most people 15 days). He and his partner from the climb hold the record for fastest ascent of Aconcagua.

Cuy Chactado (Smashed Guinea Pig)

To prepare Cuy Chactado, you put a lot of salt on the body and lay it out in the sun for a day. Then you smash it flat with a big rock and deep fry it in oil, with the rock on top. It comes out like a crispy cookie. Mmm mmmm delicious.

Climbing

Basically every day that we haven't been watching bull fights or eating guinea pig, we have been climbing. We took one trip to an isolated canyon where no one ever goes, except for an occasional climber (i.e. either Michel or this French guy, who is the only other person in Arequipa who climbs pretty hard). There, I did my first ever trad lead!

Closer to town, we taught a climbing class for girls, which is the reason I was in Arequipa to begin with. The girls really enjoyed it and I could see that they felt that climbing was an option for them too. On the last day of the class, a bunch of guys also came to boulder with us. There were a couple of boulder problems that I could do that none of the boys could do (they were probably tired). With upward of 900,000 inhabitants, Arequipa is a big city. But whenever a girl out-performs boys, word gets around fast. The rest of my time in Arequipa, I would meet people in clubs who would approach me and say "Aren´t you the girl that climbs better than boys!?" It was kind of odd, but it got me some free chocolate bars. And the important part was that the girls finally believed me that technique is more important than strength!!

Family life...

Michel's family has many reasons to celebrate, and one reason was the inauguration of a new piece of machinery for the family's wood-cutting business -- a machine that takes big chunks of wood and cuts them into smaller chunks, at your selected dimensions!! So there we were, 50 of Michel's family members and me, the only person whose last name wasn't Mendoza or wasn't married to a Mendoza. Michel's senile grandmother thinks that I am his German wife (that he is now divorced from), and it took a long time to dispel that rumor, especially because everyone liked the idea that they could tangentially be related to a Romanian-American rasta girl...

But in all, Michel and his family have been nothing but amazing to me, and I will miss them as I go off alone again to Huaraz.

Now that I am back in Peru (back to poverty, chaos, beggers, tricksters, things that are the opposite of what they say they are, dust, and dogs), daily life is a lot more of an adventure than it was in Argentina. I must say, I actually sort of enjoyed the general ease of daily life in Argentina. But on the flip side, now my blog posts will probably get more exciting.

I feel like Peru is like that puzzle where there are two doors and one always lies and the other always tells the truth, except sometimes both doors lie.

But despite all that confusion, I managed to buy a new phone! Including the country code, my number is 005154975762807. You might also be able to call at 0051975762807 (thats a slightly shorter version.) The good thing about getting my phone stolen is that my old phone was way too technological for me anyway -- now I am back to a contraption that I can handle.

I am staying at my friend Michel's parents' house. Arequipa is a desert and it rains so little here that some houses forgo having a roof, but this one is partially roofed. The house is basically several square concrete rooms on two stories, and the rooms on the second floor are connected by concrete slab walkways and ladders. Michel's room is red, yellow, green and pink. There is a loud loro (parrot) named Lorenzo. This house is awesome actually -- there's even hot water!

Michel and I went climbing at a local crag yesterday. Today and tomorrow, he has to guide some Germans up a new route on the biggest mountain around here, so I am left alone to traipse around. Traipsing around Arequipa today was fairly exhausting. Too. Many. People! There is a big search going on in the Canon de Colca for a lost person. Michel is on the search and rescue team, so if by Tuesday they dont find the guy, then it's his group's turn to go look for a few days, and I will be going with. I'm excited to learn about search and rescue procedure, although the man has been missing for over a month, which means the condors probably got to him by now...

I will probably be in this part of the country for about two weeks. Michel and I are organizing a climbing workshop for women, with the aim of getting Peruvian ladies interested in doing something other than having babies. After that is done, I want to go north to Huaraz.

I am having trouble giving up my Argentine accent. I know that if I made an effort to talk like the Peruvians, I could get it in a day's time. But to be honest, I like the Argentine accent, and it's so nice to be able to call someone "che" when I can't remember their name, and being as I'm white, it's not like I could blend in any better if my accent was more Peruvian. Whatever. Since Michel used to live in Mendoza, he gets kicks out of speaking like an Argentine too and so our conversations just go like "Che, viste, sos petiza, pero que se yo?" (Do my Argentine friends know that if they say petiza here, people will think they were born two centuries ago?)