We had another early day for the idea of taking tours so we
had to wake up at around 6am or so.
After we got cleaned up we had a short breakfast in the hotel. We were
picked up by a tour bus that brought us through the region on our way from Puno
to Chivay. We had to cross through the
mountains and go to altitudes of 4920 meters at one point on the trip. We had a
few scenic overlooks along the way but it was a couple to three hour drive
between the two points. We met a couple (not sure if they were really
a couple or just traveling together) that was a woman from Arequipa in Peru and
a Japanese man from Saporro who is living in Chile. They were very funny. The Japanese guy spoke
Spanish and a little bit of English as well.
We also met an American guy from New York named Dan who was traveling
alone through Peru and didn’t really have set plans so asked us what we were
doing to have a good idea what to do. We
told him we would meet him at 4pm to try to get him booked on our tours for the
next couple of days.
Actually we spent the night in Yanque not Chivay. Yanque is
about 15 minutes away from Chivay downhill.
The tour bus dropped us off at Chivay’s Plaza de Armas and we
immediately took a taxi to the hotel called the Eco Inn Lodge. We asked the taxi driver to bring us back to
the city at about 2pm. This gave us
enough time to get settled in and take a brief nap before we the taxi actually
did come back and pick us up and bring us to Chivay. We ate a quick lunch at a
restaurant suggested by the taxi driver which was primarily a buffet place but
we ordered off a menu because neither of us wanted buffet. Daniela had a set
menu that had quinoa soup along with medallions of alpaca and all the tea she
could drink. I had spaghetti with
hauncaina sauce with fried beef. I ate most of the spaghetti but the meat was a
bit too much for my stomach still so I left a fair bit of it behind. The guide
for our next couple days found us at the restaurant and told us we needed to be
at the bus for 3:40 but we were a few minutes late. We had told the guide about Dan and
fortunately he found him and signed him on so he would go through the Colca
Canyon on to Arequipa with us. We had to
do some shopping because Daniela needed a swimsuit. That was what put us a bit late.
The tour for 4pm was actually a visit to a local hot
springs. Daniela remembered a specific springs but that was not where we were
brought. Apparently the one she remembered is much nicer but that had a few
pools under maintenance and was too crowded to bring tours to with its now
limited number of pools. So instead we went to one just below our hotel Yanque
that I think was called Chacapi. We did
spend a fair bit of the hour in the water. It was very windy and the springs
were open air mostly so we stayed in the sheltered pool. The water was warm but not boiling hot. It
actually turned out to be reasonably pleasant even if we spent our time at the
deeper part where Daniela could not touch the floor and I could barely tip toe
to reach it. I didn’t take any pictures
of the hot springs. After the hour was
done the tour bus brought us back to the hotel where we got cleaned up and then
went to the reception area/restaurant and had a dinner of only dessert. I had
quinoa ice cream with some sort of fruit sauce on it and Daniela had a banana
crepe. They were both very good. We accompanied those with a pitcher of hot
chocolate.
When we finished that we went back to the room and watched a
movie on TV that was in English but they only gave the title Votas de Amor in
Spanish for some reason. There weren’t even subtitles in Spanish for it. It was
a romantic film starring Channing Tatum as a guy whose wife gets a brain injury
in a car accident and loses 5 years of her memory. She apparently never regained it but they
fell in love all over again. It was
supposedly based on a true story. I am
sure it was a touch fantasized. After
that we called it a night.
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