Day 435 – Arequipa
Ice Princess and Walking Tour
As I was feeling better today, we decided to explore some of the sites in Arequipa. After breakfast, we walked past the Plaza de Armas de Arequipa to our first museum in town.
Museo Santuarious Andinos
The Ice Princes is located inside the Andinos Santuarious Museum. She is a girl who was part of an Incan sacrifice ceremony on Mount Ampato. The mountain is 6,000m high so her mummy was preserved by the ice.
The courtyard of the museum
Entrance to the museum is 20 PEN ($9.84 AUD) per person and comes with a mandatory guide. Photography is prohibited inside. The guided tour begins with a video presentation that explains about the discovery.
After the presentation, we were allocated a guide. There are a few rooms with objects that were discovered at other sacrifice sites. It is believed that only the most “perfect” children were sacrificed to please the gods.
Then we went into the room that has a temperature controlled exhibit with the frozen girl. The preservation is incredible. It is believed that the girl died by a blow to the head, which is a crazy way to go in my opinion, especially after hiking 6,000m to the top of the mountain.
After the museum we went back to Holiday Backpackers Hostel to prepare and eat lunch.
Arequipa Free Walking Tour
Later in the day, we decided to join one of the many free walking tours in Arequipa. We really recommend doing one here. Our guide was very friendly and informative.
Heaps of information and facts were provided about the various buildings around the historic centre. After walking down some typical streets from the old part of town, we went to Mundo Alpaca.
Mundo Alpaca is a store that sells clothing made from alpaca wool. The best part of the place is the alpaca exhibit. Here we could see several different types of alpacas. The white one that looks like a mop is my favourite. Apparently the animals are rotated often so that they don’t have to always be gawked at by tourists.
Afterwards we were taken around the site to see the process of creating clothing from alpaca wool.
The final destination on the tour was back near the Plaza de Armas. At a rooftop bar we had some local beer (included in the tour) which was nice. But the highlight was the fact that we could walk on top of the terrace for amazing views of the cathedral and plaza.
It was one of the best walking tours we had been on. After the tour, we said our goodbyes and went back to our hostel to have dinner and sleep.