If you know me and Mita, odds are we have old you, at length, about our trip to Peru! What you might not know is that I brought an awesome medium format camera, which uses a lens the size of a small soup can to take photos on a piece of film the size of a playing card.  The whole thing has the comic appearance of a toy camera, but takes photos that are fit to be blown up to the size of posters, with incredible detail.  All of which means very little to somebody reading on the internet except for this–I had to send the film away to be processed and scanned, and it only now came back.

As I go through the pictures, I’m gonna make blog posts about the trip.  Today I’m posting the first 2 rolls, for a total of 16 photos (okay, I’m leaving one out; it’s an awkward photo of Mita in the Dallas airport).

 

The first thing to know about our trip is that there are only a few flights to Lima each day. So, when airplane you were supposed to take to Dallas in order to fly to Peru gets struck by lightening, you might spend an extra 20 hours in Dallas.  In a hotel that has had its decor maintained immaculately, but apparently exactly the way the stylist thought it should look back in 1977.  Unfortunately, it was too dark to take any good photos with the film camera inside, so you can see the 1970’s style pool area, instead.  Also in the first gallery, Mita waiting in the DFW airport, and the airplane that took us to Peru.  Or a pretty one at the gate next to ours, I can’t really remember.

Once we got out of the states, we spent a few hours walking around the Miraflores district in Lima (first two pictures), and then we flew to Arequipa, which ultimately was our home-base for this trip.  Arequipa is a beautiful city, the old part is largely built out of sillar, a porous white stone that apparently is pretty crappy as construction material, but incredibly beautiful. Oh, yeah, that’s just a llama and an alpaca chilling in the park in Arequipa. Unattended, but tied up.  I think they were there to mow the grass?

Arequipa is one of those really complicated cities–it is huge, but has a well-preserved tourist district in the old city. Juxtaposed to the charm of the old city was a crowded, dirty, and rapidly developing city with about a million residents.  I have more to say about Arequipa, but it will have to wait, since these are only rolls one and two of 21 total, so there are quite a few more posts to go!

Technical note: Photos taken with Fujifilm GW690II, on Kodak Ecktar 100 film. Captions are shutter speed/aperture, digital photo record I used to meter, with the exposure for that one in parentheses