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The Colca Canyon (Chivay, Peru)Oct 27, 2006
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Lone volcano in the distance
At nearly 5,000 metres!
Me and my new friend, Machu
| I really enjoy these 30 minutes flights between locations compared to the 6, 8, or 10 hour bus rides. We flew to Arequipa from Cuzco quite painlessly but only stayed there for a short period of time before boarding a sprinter bus for a 5 hour journey to the Colca Canyon where we'd spend the night. The Colca Canyon was a stronghold of the Spanish when they invaded the Incas, and is the 2nd biggest canyon in the world (at about twice the size of the Grand Canyon). The hotel we stayed at was probably one of the nicest ones so far. It was simple (no TV) but pretty swanky. It was settled amongst a few dozen communal farms where you could watch the workers using 100 year old methods (like ox-plows) to work the fields. There were also quite a lot of animals all over the place - bulls, llamas, donkeys and a six month old alpaca named "Machu" that seemed to live in the hotel. There really wasn't much to do at the hotel - but they did have hammocks :) I went for a few short hikes to see the canyon, but unfortunately around the hotel the canyon is quite small. The next morning we headed towards the deeper part of the canyon (about an hour away by bus) to look for condors. We stopped at a spot directly above some nests and waited for about an hour. It's not the best time of the year to see them, but usually in the morning you can watch the condors using the thermal updrafts to fly through the canyon. After about 45 minutes a single condor flew by - a baby (you can tell because its brown and not black and white), but still quite huge. An adult condor has a wingspan of 3 metres and is the largest bird of flight in the world. We didn't really see/do too much around the canyon just because of time constraints. If I were to ever come back to Peru I'd want to spend a few days here because there are lots of cool activities you can do like rafting, rapelling and paragliding. |
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