Colca Canyon

October 12-13 2012

The trip to the Colca canyon started at 3am on Friday morning. We had arranged with our hotel to hold the bags until our return on Saturday. The tour operator arrived promptly to pick us up from the hotel. We made a couple of stops at other hostels to pick up more people and were on our way to the canyon.

Our first stop was at Chivay. We had to pay an entrance fee for the canyon here and we also stopped for breakfast. It was too early in the morning, but I did catch a few glimpses of an arid Andean landscape here. From Chivay, we drove onto a view point where we stopped for seeing the condors. These are immensely huge birds that fly up to very high altitudes ( we were around 3000m at the view point). Marciel, our tour guide told us that they are scavengers and go after dead meat. In the hills, they will topple an alpaca or llama, wait for it to die, and then scavenge....

Anyway, we were very lucky that day. We saw close to 6-8 birds. The adults have a beautiful silver and black coating on their back and the young ones are brown. The flight of the condor is truly amazing. It totally made sense as to why, whoever made the Nazca lines, chose to represent these birds there.
While viewing the condors, we had a pleasant surprise. Nicole and I were commenting on the beauty of the birds, when we heard a male voice agreeing with us from behind. It was Stephen and Claire!!! They were hiking the colca canyon on their own and  arrived coincidentally at the condor viewpoint at the same time as us. We exchanged pleasantries and after about 10 minutes moved on as our bus was waiting for us.
The next stop was the ride to the beginning of the trek.  All along we saw Inca and pre-Incan steps that were built into the hills for irrigation. Marciel told us that the word Colca was the Quechua term for the grain storage unit.  These were cylindrical shaped buildings built in the Colca river valley to hold cereal and dried potatoes.
Once we arrived at the beginning of the trek, we split up into two groups. Our group consisted of six members and Marciel, our tour guide. The climb down into the canyon was arduous.  Both Nicole and I did not have sticks and our knees took quite a bit of beating. The trekking surface was made up of loose gravel and stones. We also trekked during high noon and the sun did not make things any easier. The first stop point was at the river in the valley.  To reach this we had to climb down from 3400m to 2160m.
All along the route, we had amazing views of an arid Andean landscape with a few snow-capped peaks. We passed along many trekkers and many who had started after us, passed us as well.
This was something that annoyed us a bit. Nicole and I usually take our time and have a relaxed pace with trekking.  Here we felt like we had to keep up with the group. During our climb down, Marciel gave us some coca leaves to chew on.  This is used commonly by the locals to reduce heart-rate and build the red blood cell count (increase oxygen carrying capacity).

I was totally de-hydrated and exhausted by the time I got down.  Not realizing how much energy was required beforehand, I had not loaded up at breakfast.  The cool winds in the canyon had masked my thirst. and once I reached the bottom and paused for a while, it hit me. We crossed the river via a small swing bridge, and had to go up 500m to get to our first rest point. This was when the canyon completely knocked me out. I had to come to a complete stop, eat a few biscuits and drink lots of water before I could move along.  Nicole on the other hand was smart with taking lots of water breaks and was holding up pretty well.

We arrived at Marciel's sisters house;guest lodge for lunch.  What a relief! I had one of the best lunches ever. After an arduos trek, a warm quinoa and vegetable soup was the thing we really needed. Quinoa is a grain that grows only above 3000m altitude and the grain has a very high protein and mineral content. For those of you in Bangalore, you can get the grain at the Nilgiri´s store in 4th block Jayanagar ( maybe in other places now). You can make excellent upittu with this.

After lunch, we headed back on the trail to go to our campsite for the evening. This was the most fun part of the trek.  All along Marciel showed us his village and talked about this culture. He would point out to a herb, tell us about its benifits, let us smell and taste it. It was wonderful. The wild mint leaves that grows in this part of the world doesn´t look like mint from back home.  There was another herb that is used for altitude sickness, a red berry that is peppery, and so on and so forth (too many to remember). Marciel took us to his grandmothers house where he grew up.  It was in a dilapitated farm with some really tall and old avocado trees.  I always thought that avocado trees were much smaller (not 30 ft tall).  Apparently, these grew from the seeds that Marciel planted when he was a kid.

After another 5 hours of hiking, we came to the campsite of the first day. This site is known as the Oasis.  It is not hard to imagine why.  Situated right next to the Colca river in the valley, it is one of the greenest parts in the area. We were given a bed in a room with thatched roof, This was great.  There was also a pool on the grounds.  Nicole and I took a quick dip to refresh ourselves. We had pasta with tomato sauce for dinner. I commneted that we were having ¨Pasta Bolognese sin Carne¨, and my European friends in the group got a good laugh out of it.

We had a perfect starry night.  We could see the Milky way from our site.  It was awesome.  I on the other hand had not figured out how to take those cool starry night photos, so I blew my chance (I also did not have a tripod). Polli, our Spanish friend from the group, pointed out the international space station in the sky, and it was pretty cool. We were all quite tired and went to bed early.

The next day morning, Marciel woke us up at 4.45am in the morning. We had to leave the grounds by 5.30am for our climb back up. The climb uphill is short and direct (and also very steep). Marciel told us that the record for the climb back up is about an hour (held by the locals).  Apparently, they hold races every year for $1000 and the current record for the entire trail is 3.5 hours!! We had roughly 3.5 hours to complete the climb back up.

I broke away from the group after the first 30 minutes and started climbing alone. I passed by others along the way, but Nicole was 15 to 20 minutes behind me along the trail.  I would periodically look down to make sure she was making progress and continued on.  There was something in the fresh air that morning, that just kept me going, and I did not want to hold back. I made it to the top in 2.5 hours.  Nicole followed 30 minutes later.

We had a big breakfast at the top.  I asked a village lady to pose for me so that I could take a picture of her beautiful hat.  She was thrilled ofcourse, and her friends found my interest in their hats very amusing.
After this we started our way back to Arequipa on the bus.  We stopped in the village of Maca to take a break and purchase trinkets from the locals.  I bought the Peruvian panpipes from a lady for 12soles.  I also had a chance to use a couple of Quechua words with another lady from whom I bought a few snacks. Quechua is the local language of the Andean people before the Spanish conquest.  It is still widely spoken in the highlands.  There are many varieties of Quechua depending on the region you come from.  Marciel had taught me a few words and it was fun using it.

We stopped back in Chivay to go to the hot-springs. It was great to get rid of the weariness from the 2 day hike. After the hot-springs, we came back to Chivay town center for lunch.  Here we witnessed a local wedding, which included lots of ¨rice-throwing¨ at the bride and the groom!!

We arrived in Arequipa at 5 in the evening.  We were able to gt back to the hotel where we had stored our bags.  We had a quick shower and headed off the the Bus depot, to catch our overnight bus to Cuzco.  We had an interesting experience at the Cruz del Sur bus terminal in Arequipa.  It was set-up like an airline terminal.  We had to check-in our bags, wait in a lounge area, and wait for our seat numbers to be called out, to board the bus! fun.  It was a 10hr bus ride to Cuzco...