Colca Canyon

Colca Canyon is on a similar scale to the USA's Grand Canyon, but I'd forgive you if you said you'd never heard of it before. It is deeper than the Grand Canyon (though I think that's because they measure from mountain tops to valley floor), but doesn't have the same general feeling of 'straight down' that Grand Canyon had (though it does have it in some places).

We stayed at Chivay (see above), a village about halfway down the canyon. There was a nice hot spring there which was all but deserted when I arrived, but unfortunately filled up quickly with a busload of tourists.

The town itself was nice enough, I felt it was rather bustling for such a small town in the middle of nowhere. There was an interesting variety of statuary in the village, some functional, some old looking, and a whole bunch of 'costume' statues from local folklore.

For more of these costume statues, please see the album here.

Much of the lower canyon (more suitable for agriculture) is terraced to the extreme, and has been for over a thousand years. I hadn't seen such extended areas terraced before and the scale of it all was quite impressive.

The primary reason for visiting Colca was the opportunity to see Andean Condors.  They live in the canyon, and can regularly be seen riding the early morning thermals on their way out for the day's hunting. We drove down to Condor Cross early and crossed our fingers we would see some.

Luck was with us, and we saw one in about 10 minutes, unfortunately it was rather far away.

After about half an hour or waiting and watching, we started to walk along the canyon to see a bit of it, and hopefully some more condors.  What we did see was some humming birds. Enormous humming birds.  Really huge, they must have been the size of UK blackbirds, but still doing the whole hovery thing.

The flowers the hummingbirds go for.  The heads are about 1-2 feet long

There were some pretty cacti, and a nice view of the busy touristy bit we had started at, now covered in tourists.

We also got to see up close some cochineal insects feeding on cacti.  They don't look like much, in fact it just looks a bit moldy, but the insects are vitally important source of many different dyes that have traditionally been used in the Andes for a long time.  When dried, crushed and mixed with different plants they produce a stunning variety of different colours. I don't understand the chemistry of it, but it's bound to be pretty complex!

Then, finally ...  Condors!!! These guys are really huge. Two came swooping over us for a bit of a nosey, then they headed off over the hills.

Just when we thought we were done and were about to head back to the bus, another 2 condors came for a flypast!  These were juveniles, but came really, really close (about 10-20 feet away) as they had a nosey.

The drive back to Arequipa after was fairly uneventful, but we did spot some wildlife. Some Andean ducks, 2 flamingos and some more alpacas, llamas and vicuna.

During our travels, we had seen many people, particularly ladies, dressed up in 'traditional dress', most of them selling tat to tourists.  That makes me uncomfortable, both the tat selling and the traditional dress just for tourists, and I have avoided taking photos of them, partly because I feel it's rather fake, and partly because I'm not prepared to have the discussion about giving them a tip for taking photos of them. I did find one group in Colca that I was happy to take a photo of, and it kinda is traditional dress!

Arequipa

From Nazca it was an 8 hour overnight bus journey to get us to the city of Arequipa. This was the first of 3 similar trips on Peruvian coaches and I have to say I was impressed. The seats were comfortable, spacious, had good reclining and footrests so laying down for a sleep was easy. The sir con on the last bus was a bit dodgy, but other than that, good.

I had the feeling I was being followed...

Arequipa is another city, so not my favorite setting. It's the second largest city in Peru, and is over 2000m above sea level. There were some volcanoes around the city which were quite impressive, and the usual plethora of churches and posh government buildings.

Being around Christmas, there were lots of trees decorated and nativity scenes.  I quite liked this one made from straw!

While in the city we also had our first proper encounter with Alpacas (below). We assumed they were llamas (the ll is pronounced y in Spanish, so 'yamas'), but were corrected and shown how to distinguish between the two camelids.

There were many craft shops all over Peru selling alpaca wool clothing, many claiming to be '100% baby alpaca'. We were warned that some of these may well be 'maybe alpaca' instead!

Alpaca

Llama

When we left Arequipa for Colca Canyon we were also introduced to a third, much rarer, smaller and prettier camelid, the vicuna. These are far less numerous than either alpaca or llama, roam in the wild, and have a much finer wool (which can only be sheared every 3 years). Vicuna clothing sells for ridiculous prices ($1800 for a scarf) and comes with official certificates of authenticity.

In contrast to the lovely vicuna, we also saw the Yura cement factory on the road to Colca, and it looked like something out of Mad Max. It also meant that there were many very slow moving lorries on the twisty windy road, which the journey rather slow.

At the highest point on the road, we had yet more views of volcanoes, at one point we could see 7 at once, one of them intermittently belching smoke. We were very high by this stage, another 1000 meters or so higher than Arequipa, and we were all starting to feel the altitude.

To combat the altitude, I had purchased myself a small bag of coca leaves. You basically roll them up and suck a few of them for 10 - 15 minutes (with a chunk of chalk-like sugar as a catalyst for extracting the cocaine) and it makes you feel better. It certainly makes your mouth a bit numb, but I think it did help give me a bit of a boost to combat the altitude, and I used them a few times, particularly on day two of the Inca Trail.