Cañon de Colca: The beginning

After our day of touring Arequipa on Friday, we had a nice dinner of traditional Arequipeña food and returned to the hostel to pack and get ready for our hike. We were able to leave our non-hiking stuff at the hostel, and organized our stuff into two backpacks and tried to go to bed early, because we were getting picked up by our guide at 3:30 on Saturday morning, or really in the middle of the night!

Our alarm woke us up, we stuffed our last things in the bag, met our guide and stumbled out the door to the bus.  There were several other groups of hikers already on the bus, and we stopped and picked up a few more before heading out of Arequipa around 4 am.  The first few hours are quite fuzzy, as we tried to sleep and stay warm on the bus.  Eventually, around 7:30, I woke up, opened the curtains over the bus windows, and saw this:

We had crossed the high pass in the mountains and were now in the Colca Valley, near the town of Chivay.  We stopped briefly to have the guides buy our tourist tickets and had small breakfasts on the bus as well. At this point it had become clear that all of us on the bus were part of several different trekking groups, as there were 4 different guides accompanying us. JP and I were happy to discover that our group consisted of the two of us and our guide.  We continued driving on dirt roads through the Colca Valley, and most of the scenery looked like this:

 

The picture above shows a close up of the stone walls that were built in this area, apparently when the Inca were in charge, to form terraces in the hilly valley that made it easier to farm and manage livestock. The first picture shows a wider view of the terraces in the valley.

 

We also passed through a few villages, such as this one:

We didn't stop anywhere, however, because we were on our way to the Cruz del Condor, where the Colca Valley becomes the Colca Canyon and where you are often able to see Andean Condors, an endangered species whose nests in the area are protected. We made it to the Cruz del Condor a little before 9 am, and this is what we found:

 

As you can see, we were not alone in our admiration of the condors--they are huge! We saw three total, who flew back and forth right around the lookout points. There are hot air drafts in this area and the condors can actually just float on the drafts, without having to beat their wings. It is pretty cool to watch.  After a little while though, we had gotten the idea and we had to get back on the bus to stay on schedule.

We arrived in Cabanaconde, a little town which would be our jumping off point for the hike.  First we had an early lunch at a little restaurant catering to tour groups like ours, and our fellow bus travelers separated into their respective groups for their own hikes.

 

Next up: Day one of our hike