Azangaro is a great cattle-breeding province, and there is a considerable trade in cheeses with Arequipa and other parts. I found very great difficulty in procuring animals to enable me to continue my journey. At length I succeeded in hiring four miserable-looking, vicious, undersized ponies; and, having crossed the Azangaro on balsas, by far the largest river I had passed over since leaving Puno, the way led over the rocky range of Pacobamba hills into another plain, where there were several cattle and sheep farms; and the village of Corruarini, consisting of a ruined church and a dozen huts. The river Azangaro rises in the snowy mountains of Caravaya, forms an immense curve of nearly half a circle in a course of about two hundred miles, and, uniting with the river of Pucara, falls into the lake of Titicaca as the river Ramiz, the largest of its affluents. After a ride of six leagues we reached the little village of San José, under a conical hill, and close to the snowy mountains of Surupana. I dined with the cura, Fray Juan de Dios Cardenas, who gave me a list of medicinal herbs used in Azangaro; and the beasts from that place were so infamous that I was obliged to invoke his assistance to procure fresh ones. It appeared that two Frenchmen had passed a few days before, on their way to establish a saw-mill in the Caravaya forests, with a view to floating timber down the river of Azangaro to lake Titicaca, and that they had ill-treated some Indians. It was thus very difficult to induce them to furnish ponies, but the alcaldes, with their great hats and long sticks, were summoned, and, after some negotiation, they were induced to supply four ponies to go as far as Crucero, the capital of the province of Caravaya. It was most fortunate that I was enabled to do this, for, during the night, the owners of the Azangaro ponies came out to San José, and stole them, so that we should have been left without even this wretched means of conveyance.