South America & Falklands - part six

Further down the Peruvian coast is General San Martin, named for South America's other great liberator from the Spanish. The port, bounded by desert, is desolate.

However, there's a Canadian connection. Rock salt for northern winter roads, with which I used to do rust battle when I had a car, is exported from here. A pile sits beside the ship.

My day's passed exploring a dramatic coast reached by crossing a short stretch of some of the world's driest desert.

As a faded national park sign shows, an 8.0 magnitude earthquake in 2007 collapsed what was once an arch known as La Catedral (The Cathedral).

In the closest city, Pisco, more than four hundred died.

Finally, with my point-and-shoot camera, manage to snap a bird. Oh! I did manage a nice pelican shot off Panama. Anyway, a modest achievement on a ship filled with birders armed with lenses like cannons. This is a Whimbrel.

Englishman in newly acquired Panama hat inspects seagull.

At the tiny fishing port of Lagunillas, a cafe ...

... some boats ...

... and portable toilet in the desert. I’m titling this ‘lonesome loo’. 

The final Peruvian call takes me far inland. More desert and narrow roads on which South American busses regularly seem to plunge hundreds of metres to messy ends.

A first glimpse of the High Andes of which I hope to see more in southern Chile and Argentina.

The power and telephone lines are in Arequipa, nearly 2,400 metres above sea level (and home of Mario Vargas Llosa, winner of the 2010 Nobel Prize for literature). Certainly not where I'd expected a Galapagos Turtle occupying a pleasant patch of grass far from the ocean.

My main reason for coming here is the Santa Catalina Convent in which nuns have been cloistered since 1579. A few - now less isolated - remain. Despite repeated earthquake damage, their home is quite wonderful.

Until 1970, when opened, the convent - one of the world's biggest and behind high walls - was something of a mystery. It's now popular with locals.

Less of a mystery is this young couple - so Latin! Wouldn't have caught me in my disastrous heyday doing that. Mind you, I can't play the guitar.

'Farewell, gloomy, relation-challenged Anglo,' says the Arequipan gargoyle. Next stop Chile.