Manuel is our guide for this three day trip from Arequipa to Colca Canyon and back again. He says he learned his English watching HBO and some of what he says is very funny as usually the context is a bit off. His English is a thousand times better than any Spanish I have, so my admiration is huge.
Our bus trip to the first village in the Canyon takes about four hours. En route we stop at a lookout where we can see a very productive agricultural valley, our very first vicunas, then alpacas and llamas and an interpretation centre as well as a rest stop where there is a market early in the day. What has me amazed very soon is the vegetation. There either isn’t any, or it is desert type stuff like cactuses or grasses. There is also a small shrub that seems to be a conifer, though it has yellow blossoms on it. There are also eucalyptus scattered around, apparently imported from Australia many years ago because the only trees that are native take too long to grow to be of much use. I think they may have discovered there are problems with the imported species and now what to do is the question. In any case I’m totally floored by the fact there are cactus covering the Andes … who’d have thought?
The road down into the Canyon has a good number of switch backs, I’m sure I should be concerned, but am not. We go past a volcanoe that Manuel points out as having blown its top about a million years ago and sent rock all the way to the Pacific Ocean. Cool! We see Mismi, the mountain that is the source of the Amazon River. More cool! “The ultimate source of the Amazon has only recently been firmly established as a stream on a 5,597 metre (18,363 ft) peak called Nevado Mismi here in the Peruvian Andes, roughly 160 km west of Lake Titicaca and 700 km S.E. of Lima. The mountain was first suggested as the source in 1971 but this was not confirmed until 2001. The waters from Nevado Mismi flow into the RÃo ApurÃmac which is a tributary of the Ucayali which later joins the Marañón to form the Amazon proper”–Wickipedia. And so we arrive at Chivay, the first of the villages that are considered to be in Colca Canyon. Actually I should have been saying Colca Valley … the canyon is only really the part of the river valley that has steep sided cliffs and this doesn’t actually qualify yet. But while I’m on about this, I should point out that the Colca Canyon is actually almost twice as deep as Colorado’s Grand Canyon. Very cool!
There are pre-Inca agriculture terraces everywhere one looks. I’m not sure if the terraces developed because they needed to put the rocks someplace so they could farm the land, or if it was a combination of that and the fact you develop microclimates by building walls around the fields. Whatever the case, the fields and walls are everywhere and it is spring time so plowing and planting is well underway. I’m not sure we see even one tractor though, teams of oxen seem to be the beast of choice and that makes all sorts of sense when one looks at the terrain. The people here are most often dressed in traditional attire which is very colourful and extremely decorated. I think the rest can be told through the photos I took.
Our hotel is very posh the first night … even a hot springs to have a soak in. Most of us have a very sound sleep that night. We even have hot water bottles delivered at bedtime, what a treat!
Our second day is a bit different than planned. Our bus had a problem that got fixed last evening while we were enjoying the hot springs but then as we are on our way to Yanqui another mechanical glitch happened. So back to Chivay we go for further repairs. Of course we make good use of the two hours there to scour the market for more interesting finds. Once back on the road again, we travel to Cabanaconde at the far end of the valley. We are soon settled in there, have lunch and then off on horse and mule back we go to get a slower and close up look at the neighbourhood and countryside. It was probably the only activity planned for us that had less than stellar results. We did all survive though so naught more need be said. Cabanaconde is notable for me as it was the jumping off point for the high altitude archaeologist who discovered Juanita the Ice Maiden on Ampato, a mountain behind Cabanaconde.
The next morning we are up very early so we can arrive at Cruz del Condor in time to see the impressive Andean condor. This bird is the largest flying bird in the world. Manuel thinks we should stop sooner than the main tourist site and that proves to be an excellent plan. There are five condors drifting in the thermals and we can ooh and aah without a thousand other people there.
After our interesting stops in Yanqui and Maca and a lunch stop in the now familiar Chivay, the rest of the day is mostly spent just trying to assimilate the landscape as we return to Arequipa. The dust that sifts into the bus and settles on everything proves how dry this part of the country is. A very interesting three days for sure!
To see all the Peru pictures click here.
Laughed and laughed about this. No doubt there will be lean times ahead. make the most of it! Brian is pnnitirg off your blogs for Gran keeping them all entertained so that’s great.