Arequipa - Colca Canyon

  Arequipa, Peru
Thursday, January 15, 2009

Week 11 Jan 12-18
I arrived in Arequipa on Thursday morning after the best bus journey yet. Blankets, a fully reclining seat big enough for an American and even an ¨in-flight¨ meal. You get what you pay for I guess...

Entrance to the canyon

I spent the day looking for Brendan, an Irish guy I befriended in La Paz. He had been in Cusco just ahead of me and had come overnight on an the same route but different bus. Find him I didn´t, we spent the entire missing each other by minutes and only managing to communicate via facebook. It was a reminder of life before mobile phones.

¨Cruz Del Condor¨

We were due to book the same tour of Colca Canyon and I decided to book one anyway leaving that night at 3 a.m.! 

Colca Canyon is one of the deepest Canyons in the world and is over twice the depth of the famous Grand Canyon. Brendan was on the bus albeit asleep so my first chat to him was at about 9 a.m. at the Mirador, Cruz Del Condor, the most famous lookup point for these magnificent birds. The picture speaks for itself. The only

Cabanaconde women working hard

thing on view that morning was cloud and alot of it. Not a bird in sight. An hour there and we pressed on disappointed for Cabanaconde. A very grey, quiet, sleepy town. There was not much happening there except for a hive of busy women repairing the road surface on the main square. I´m not sure where all the men were, farming perhaps.

Thats what they´re supposed to look like

 Everywhere we went we could only find woman working.  Everything was covered in flies, there were many animals walking around the streets, not many paved roads as such just dirt tracks and narrow alleyways, and with the continuous cloud/mist the

Edge of canyon

 town had a very eerie feel. It wasn´t a very enticing place at all. (Check out the gallery for more photos).  I did manage to snap a condor but it was only a statue in the main square. At least I know what they are supposed to look like. We had some breakfast there to prepare for the

Yes we´re going down there

3 hour hike to and down into the canyon. After a 2 mile walk to edge of the canyon and I was greeted by the biggest wall of rock I have ever seen. At about 3.5 kilometers high I was facing a canyon side that ran from about 5500m down to the canyon floor at 2000m. I was simply lost for words. We peered over the edge to the valley floor and to the ¨Oasis¨ at the bottom.

trekking down the canyon face

It was a struggle to see all the way down even though on our side it was a mere 1200m drop. The photos here will not do the sight justice in any way as I wasn´t even able to capture it all into one photo. 2 knee aching hours of sliding later we were on the canyon floor and I can easily say it was more difficult than any descent on the inca trail. We rested for a while and trekked back up towards a nearby village, our home for the night. There is no electrictiy in this part of the canyon so card games were the order of the night followed by one of the quietest soundest sleeps in a long time.

Lesson in local culture

Day 2 was a mainly flat 3 hour trek across the canyon just a few hundred metres up from the floor to the Oasis a few kilometers away. The Oasis is a nickname given to a village on the riverside that has been developed into a mini resort with palm trees, lush green grass and swimming pools surrounded by wooden huts. On the way there the guide gave us an education in the local trees, plants and animals

Is it a Kondor or a pigeon?

and how the communities live off of them. We stopped off in a ¨museum¨ along the way where we sampled some local beer and were given a demonstration on farming, hunting and cooking tools and techniques. Afterwards there was some excitement when we spotted what we believed to be a young condor. I could not get the camera out quick enough so the only photo I have is a fairly lousy shot

Dual Inca and Christian shrine

from quite a distance. To be honest looking at the photo it could have been a pigeon. Along the track we came across many crosses built on top of a pile of rocks. The rocks originally were inca shrines to the mountains and would have been covered in gold. The gold also

Local Taxi

 served to light up the track along the mountain side as the sun would have shone off the gold giving a serious of easily distinguishable lights. When the Spanish Conquistadors arrived they removed all of the gold and stuck the Christian Cross on top. They forced the locals to pray to the cross instead but secretly they would have been still

Canyon floor 2

praying to the mountains. We also encountered many ¨taxis¨ and ¨trains¨ along the way. Those who can afford to, travel by mule from town to town in the valley and up to the towns above. The mules are also so well trained that sometimes they are sent unaccompanied laden with goods to the next town. Amazingly they can be trusted to trod along the well worn paths to the next town.

Lodgings in the Oasis

By early afternoon we reached the Oasis for some sunbathing by the pool. It is an idyllic setting, peaceful and remote. You get the feeling of being so far away from everything. No electricity, no mobile phone signal, an excellent location for a retreat. I relaxed at the pool for the afternoon and spent the evening sipping a beer and playing cards. My lodging that night was a bed on stilts in a very picturesque wooden cabin. Not much protection from the elements here and I´m sure I had many insects visit me during the night. 

The ladies of Chivay

Day 3, my inca trail experience came in handy for scaling the 1200m climb back to Cananaconde. I managed to do it in 1 hour 40 minutes. Considering it took 2 hours to come down I was quite pleased with myself. The altitude training over the last 3 weeks had paid off.  It was a steeper longer climb than the one on the inca trail but with a lot more oxygen from starting at a lower altitude it was alot easier. After some brekkie in Cabanaconde we drove back through the canyon on to the hot springs at Chivay, an all you can eat buffet and a chat with the locals...