Colca Canyon

Vicuna

El Misti Volcano

Eqyptian Llama

Walking through feild of purple corn

Colca Canyon is the 2nd deepest canyon in the world. And for some utterly crazy reason we paid good money to scale down into its depths and then get up the next day and crawl our way out again. But I am being too harsh. And jumping ahead a bit.

We left Arequipa with a wonderful group of people and drove out across the mountains. We stopped to meet vicunas, a delicate relative of the alpaca, who has only just been brought back from the brink of extinction, and whose wool is worth US$200 per 200grams. We crossed a pass at 4900m which was a shock to all of us, not being able to walk without losing our breath. We froze our butts off in an attempt to see condors, and we did see 3, or perhaps it was the same one coming back to check if we were dead yet.

And then we reached Colca, Colca is huge. Like gargantuan. It was quite terrifying to think that we had to climb down into it. But climb, stumble, trip our way down we did. We started at 3300m, ambling through purple corn fields, and then we dropped 1200m in just under 2 and a half hours. But it was fabulous, you could almost forget the struggle if you just looked at the view, and tried not to look down too often.
At the bottom was an oasis of fruit trees, bright flowers, and a beautiful cool spring to bath in. Just what we all needed to recover. When we woke at 4am the next day, after a fairly comfortable nights sleep in a tent, it was raining. Not the bright start to the long hard climb out we were all hoping for. But to our relief the rain stopped just after we set out, and had actually helped us by settling all the dust. Tough, the only word for it, straight up the side of the canyon in 3 hours. Two of our team, already stuggling with the high altitude, had to be carried out by mule. But at the top, to our delight, what had fallen as rain below, had landed as snow on all the peaks around us. The most wonderful back drop to our triumphant stagger over the top of the canyon! And to top it all off, as we drove back, we saw a beautiful condor swoop over us, close enough to realise the size of it.

The decent

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