PERU: A touch of class in Arequipa

I'M AT: El Caminante Class, Arequipa, $8 each in a beautiful quad room, hot water, TV, balcony, courtyard, sun terrace. Lovely.

So after the grind of Nazca came the cut-above city of Arequipa, where dark shadows hide only sunshine.

The big draw here is the nunnery of Santa Catalina, a small walled city in its own right, with walls painted ochre, blue, white and yellow. This place was established soon after the Spanish arrived, and must have been some sort of haven for a Europe blighted by war and disease. I swear we saw crooked steps leading the nuns up to some of the finest sunbathing in South America. Allegedly they held parties here, until a much stricter Sister iintroduced chainmail underwear and barbed wire pennance. But all in all, Santa Catalina is beautiful, a sanctuary for the mind and soul.

Sitting in her own icy sanctuary some blocks away is Juanita, a mummified Incan girl found some years back, above the snowline, in the mountains. The booth in which she rests is really nothing more than a fridge-freezer. There's no money here to buy her a fitting chamber, so she sits all icy and slowly rotting away, a far cry from the perfect conditions in which her body was preserved 500 years ago. If truth be told, Juanita is a bit ugly - her teeth jut out from a dehydrated face, and she's all curled up on top of herself, in the shape she was buried. But the Arequipans are rightly proud of her, and she has a real aura of, somehow, peace. An odd thing to say about a human sacrifice.

Arequipa's other big draw is the Colca Canyon, which is the second-deepest in the world, and in which live families of condors.

(Along with pumas and snakes, condors are very important in Incan mythology, representing humans, the earth, and the sky, respectively. Macchu Picchu is apparently built in the shape of a condor, but I'd argue that the shape is determined by the mountains on which it's built. We would shortly discover that Lake Titicaca is also, apparently, formed in the shape of a sacred animal, in this case a puma - chasing a visqaca (a mountain-rabbit).

But these lake-shapes can only be seen now using satellite photography, and as the Incans famously left no written records, how they mapped and subsequently deified this mystical puma was lost on me. We'd find out that these three animals were a little TOO important for some of the tour guides, who seem to see animal shapes in everything they see. It's mostly, in my opinion, a load of old fanny.)

There are loads of different tours to Colca, but as time was short we took a two-day tour with an overnight stop in Chivay. Chivay at night turned out to be one of the coldest places on Earth, made worse when I stepped in some overflow from the sink during a midnight piss, giving me wet hiking socks for the rest of the night.

The Colca trip was a bit of a disappointment, really. We saw one condor, which was great, but most of the rest of the time was spent rattling around at the back of our coach. Every small town we stopped a rolled out the tourist tat for the bus. And whilst the landscape was glorious, all golden in the sunlight, the sheer number of coaches on tour, stopping for the llamas, was a it overwhelming. The Typical Andean Dance at night, durng the meal, was good, though; a local girl whacked her boyfriend round the arse with a hard whip. The harder she whipped, the more she wanted him. And she was very pretty.

During my time in Arequipa we also visited several bars and restaurants, including Retro, the Forum, Govinda's, and some posh place near the Mirador with a terrible singer who'd loudly practice his tunes and then deliver them moments later, as if his audience had been temporarily deafened.

And naturally we flirted with the girls.