Moving on to Arequipa

I was not attracted by Lima.  We had spent a few hours in the center of the city  on the day before Yom Kippur, which was a Peruvian national holiday.  The Plaza de Armas and many of the huge churches and public buildings were impressive, but the sky is gray, the city sprawls, and the general poverty is fairly evident.  

At the small ceremony we held in the synagogue there, we met three members of the High Mountain Rescue Unit: the commander of the entire unit, which functions in three locations in Peru: Arequipa, Cuzco, and Huaraz; Robert Grandez, the commander of the Arequipa unit, who had worked with Ofer in searching for Asher; and one of Robert's men.  They wore dark green, impeccably pressed dress uniforms and looked very formal and impressive.

After we reached Arequipa, we got to know Robert and the rest of his men quite well, though we were separated by the barrier of our ignorance of Spanish.  If we had arrived in Peru without any contributions for the High Mountain Rescue Unit, simply for the purpose of expressing our gratitude personally, I think their response would have been no less cordial and sympathetic than it was.

Judith, our daughter Hannah, our son Boaz, and I flew to Arequipa, but Ofer took the overnight bus with the policeman.  There was no money to spare for air fare for them.  In fact, we even had to pay for their bus fare.  The unit's budget is extremely limited.

Arequipa, from the moment we landed at its small airport, was a welcome contrast to Lima.  True, even from the plane you could see that it was also plagued with poverty: it is surrounded by tin-roofed, adobe houses, more like outlying villages than suburbs, but the sky was perfectly clear, the sun was bright, the air was brisk, and the steep mountains all surrounding the city looked  like a painted backdrop, too impressive to be real.

Judith had found a good hotel for us near the center of the city, but not on a noisy street, very close to the Convent of Santa Catalina, one of the major tourist attractions, which we eventually visited.  

Though we weren't really there as tourists, along with the knowledge that we were closing in on Asher's memory, there was the constant effort to see and decipher this new and unfamiliar country.  Arequipa, with its white stone, Spanish colonial architecture, is very attractive.  None of the buildings are taller than two or three stories at most - probably  because of the constant threat of earthquakes.

We decided not to go and see the hostel where Asher had stayed.  It was enough to know that he had spent the last days of his short life in this city.