by Jerome au Perou
Fri Aug 10th, 2012 at 02:59:15 AM EST
Hi everybody. This is just to do a quick introduction to this travel blog - I'll be in Peru and Bolivia for the next 3 weeks and hope to share some of our experiences here.
We arrived 2 days ago, but the first day was really just crashing at the hotel after the 12 hour flight (the oddly named Faraones Hotel) and then flew in the morning to Arequipa, a city to the south of the country and a well-known starting point for trekking, given how the town is surrounded by 6,000m-odd volcanoes nearby.
We were able to spend a leisurely afternoon in the city center, which is an old - and colorful - colonial town (it dates back to 1540):
One of the central buildings is the "Church of the Firm" ir the headquarters of the Jesuits:
On the main square on the town, they had demonstrations of stone (a very specific local white volcanic stone and metal sculpting, done by the local trade school:
Today, we're starting moving towards the altiplano (we're "only" at 2,300m now) and hopefully will be able to report soon about these.
