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The next day we woke up and went to the Banos del Inca again. The Banos are natural thermal waters that are about 70 deg Celsius. The first day Matt and I went to the public pool at sl. 3 each. The “turno” lasts about an hour and a half and you share the pool with a LOT of other people with no regard for personal space or tranquility. It was basically a YMCA pool with twice as many kids and no control. Some people were swimming laps where they could find room, but you couldn’t go a few feet without bumping into someone. I think I got splashed at least every 5 minutes. I imagined a quiet spa experience, laying in the hot water and relaxing. Nope, but I had an experience nonetheless. Day 2 Matt and I thought we’d try the private rooms and at sl.5 per person, we rented the Imperial Baths for 25 minutes. This room you filled the pool yourself and controlled the temperature, so we were able to make it HOT. 25 minutes was more than enough with that hot water. I think you could boil yourself if you weren’t careful enough.

After the baths, Maelys was sick so Matt and I checked into a new hostal in town, since the French crew were leaving that evening. By the time we had ourselves situated, Maelys felt better and we took a hike through the countryside, heading towards the Ventanillas de Otuzco (pre-Inca graves dug into the volcanic hillside that look like a bunch of windows). We only had a tourist map of lines and apparently a river connects the Banos del Inca to the road near Otuzco, so we just decided to walk along the river and find our own way. It was so much fun to walk along and see the pigs and cows and sheep and people just doing their own things. The landscape was beautiful. It’s so much nicer to be around green plants and mountains after the desert coast for a month. We arrived at the Ventanillas and checked them out until it started to rain. We picnicked at a small family restaurant across the street. They were nice enough to let us eat our own food under their shelter, so we ordered some chica de jora.

Chica de jora is the homemade corn beer that tastes like apple cider with a kick. If you don’t think about the fermentation process, it’s quite tasty. To make the beer, you must cook the giant corn and traditionally the elder women would chew it up and spit it into the pot along with the rest of the corn. Nowadays I don’t think it has to be any specific person to do the spitting. There is an enzyme in human saliva that activates the fermentation of the chica. Add sugar, let sit. We drank the 3 day old chicha and it was delicious. The woman who made it told us that the 8 day old chicha is quite harsh (maybe it tastes like apple cider vinegar…why apple cider from corn, I don’t know.) Chicha de jora is not a mass-produced beverage; you can only find it in people’s homes or small restaurants. Maelys ordered a 650ml coca cola and it cost sl.2. Our 1 liter of chicha de jora was sl.1. I didn’t think the alcohol content was too high; perhaps a little less than beer, but it’s sweet so it’s difficult to really taste the alcohol clearly.

When it stopped raining, we took a combi back to town to catch another combi to Llacanora to hopefully get to the waterfall before dark. The trip from Cajamarca to Llacanora is only 13km away, but the road is dirt and full of pot holes, so it took about a half hour to get there. The town itself was really cute, an old church, a small plaza with clover growing as a ground cover. We hiked through town and the trail was about 1km through hilly farms along a river. The waterfall itself was pretty and the drop was big, although there wasn’t a lot of water in the waterfall nor was there a pool to swim in. It was a little chilly anyways, I’ll find another waterfall to swim in later on. We hiked up on one side of the river and we hiked back on the other side to come across two smaller (and more scenic) waterfalls before reaching town again. Our French companions left that night to enjoy another 6 hours on the Hornas bus and Matt and I stayed in Cajamarca two more days.

We visited the Cerro Santa Apolonia, a garden covered hilltop with great views of the city. At the top there are some rocks carved from the Inca period, one of them said to be an Inca throne, where they can review their troops. We hiked down the other side of the hill and entered some unknown neighborhood and hiked up to the top of their hill (well, almost to the top) and found a lot of ugly pigs, some cows and a donkey. We met a nice old lady who was wrapped up in her mantas and we couldn’t understand anything she said (except “gringitos!”) because she had her mouth covered with the shawl. Her friend/daughter wasn’t covered in mantas and talked with us for awhile. She told us at the top of their town is a guy with an alpaca ranch. It was really fun to just wander around the town and enjoy the view.

That night we had some of the best pizza so far and returned to the Banos del Inca again. We rented the “Humboldt” bath this time, same price but 30 minutes. It was about half the width and length of the other bath but twice as deep. It was nice to just relax in a hot bath. Peru has a lot of hot springs and I look forward to jumping into as many of them as I can. Our last day in Cajamarca was spent relaxing, blogging and walking around town again before we catch our 1pm bus to Celendin. Thank goodness this 5 hour busride will be spent in the daylight because it’s supposed to be just as bumpy, if not more than, our previous bus ride.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 6th, 2007 at 8:10 pm and is filed under travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.