Too much to say

There's so much to take in, and to delight in, that it's really very hard to keep up any kind of an account of it all. And that's before the nightly pisco sour!


There was the visit to Maximo Laura's tapestry studio and private collection in Lima, which was an overload of the colour sensors and had me quietly thanking Maralyn Hepworth with all my heart for the introduction to the basics of tapestry and of colour blending that made me able to appreciate how technically impressive, as well as aesthetically beautiful, what I was seeing really was.

There was Mistura, the annual celebration of Peruvian food production and cuisine, which was an fun explosion of taste and colour and a chance to view something of the vast potato production which is Peru's answer to the Inuit ('You just have 50 names for snow: we actually grow 300 varieties of potato'). Not to mention the amazing meals we have had at a range of restaurants in Lima and now Arequipa, several of them owned or designed by Gaston Acuria. A delight.

And now we're in Arequipa, having visited some of its historical prettiness today and learned something of Juanita the ice maiden, the little girl of 12 or 13 presented as a human sacrifice to the mountain gods in an Inca ritual some 500 years ago and discovered preserved by the ice in the late 1990s. And tomorrow - oh giddiness - we start our textile workshops: in my case starting with four days of hand embroidery with the fantastically accomplished Elena and Anabél as teachers.

So a bag of loose ends blogwise, but the reality, happily, flows as smoothly as pisco...