Sunday, May 28, 2006

Arequipa & the Colca canyon (24-28/May/06)

Arequipa, Peru

Headed out on the morning bus to Arequipa, which is the nearest town to the "deepest canyon in the world" - Colca (in fact it’s the second, it has a deeper nearby neighbour Cotahuasi, but that involves a 12h bus ride). After visiting a few agencies we decided we could easily trek round there without a guide and headed off to the pub. We found a bar in the middle of the Gringo area which had a few locals, plus an enticing happy hour. Chatted with a couple of girls who were studying tourism and decided to hook up with them the next day for them to practice their skills on us, which we did. But no real tour of Arequipa as we were all pretty hung-over, so we all had lunch instead. Then they went off to their lessons and we went off to see the Davinci Code at the cinema. Near the end there was a small tremor (Arequipa is in the thick of it in terms of earthquakes) so we were scared stiff (remembering the fun we had in the Tsunami in Thailand) for the rest of the film and consequently didn’t really understand the plot.

The next morning we headed off to the Colca canyon. Had lunch and started the descent. After about 3h we reached the bottom where we bumped into some French Canadians we had met before in Puno, so we continued with them for the little bit left to the next village hostel. There we met a couple of other agency groups and all had a nice meal and evening chat together. The next day we followed the groups with guide at a discrete distance until we knew we couldn’t get lost, walked around the amazing canyon scenery and a couple of villages and then down to the "oasis", a series of swimming pools where we had lunch. Then the long march up. I decided to cane it and did it in 2h. Double the time of one of the guide’s record. Ah well. At least I impressed the 70 year-old donkey driver I met, who said he normally took that long. And I got to see my first hummingbird in action.

The next morning we got a stupidly early bus to a place where condors gather, and spent an hour looking (and photographing) at the impressive birds. From there we returned to Arequipa for a slap-up meal with some of the treckers we had met on the way. Also got a yummy present of some home-made maple syrup!

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