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Put Out to Pasture (In a Good Way) in Chivay

All this week, Nathan Paluck will be filling us in on "The Real Peru" outside the capital city of Lima. Any questions or suggestions, send 'em to us here.

When I arrived at dawn to the bus station in Arequipa to leave for El Cañon del Colca, tickets were sold-out for the 6 a.m. departure and there was already a crowd buying spots for the 9 a.m.

A woman and I went to the bus anyway and eventually convinced the driver to let us stand in the middle. Seriously. But as we learned, there seems to be a lot of local commuting between Arequipa and the villages along the canyon, so we recommend buying a ticket beforehand.

The ride to the canyon is five hours long and passes through a protected reserve, home to vicuñas, the wild, skinny cousins of the llama.

I ending up stopping in Chivay, a small town full of hostels. A couple miles out of town there are mineral-rich thermal baths, which I later walked to. Beyond the baths houses, cow paths lead to small parcels of pasture and farmland. I caught up with a man and daughter walking with two dozen head of cattle.

Marlene, the 25-year-old cowgirl pictured above, and her father Emiliano turned out to be extremely friendly and didn't mind the company and questions from a gringo (although the cows were wary). I helped Marlene get the cows into their stone wall enclosure and left thinking I might actually deserve the dip in the thermal baths.

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