Colca Canyon
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Rosa and I planned to see Colca Canyon in the province of Arequipa. Initially, it was going to be a romantic weekend just the two of us. Then we were going to go with another couple: Rosa’s best friend, Jessica, and her new fiance, Anthony. Anthony couldn’t find tickets so I enlisted the help of Beto. Beto bought eleven tickets and added seven more trekkers, including himself. So we were eleven altogether: Me, Rosa, Jessica, Anthony, Beto, Karen, Emilio, Patricia, Giancarlo, Cesar, and Rocio. Ironically, I was the only one who knew everybody in the group. We all got wasted until 4am Saturday night so the early Sunday morning departure was hell.
The altitude in Colca is ridiculous, higher than any of these other ridiculously high altitudes in Peru. Colca Canyon is technically deeper than the Grand Canyon in Arizona, but the walls aren’t as clearly defined or vertical so it’s less recognized and the pictures are less canyon-esque. The bus made five or six stops on the way, making a three-hour drive into a six-hour drive. On one stop near a flock of llamas, I asked the tour guide if there was enough time for whichever males may be so inclined to have sex with one. Nobody laughed. Nobody. Blank stares. Oh well, you can’t be funny all the time.
We pulled into the small pueblo of Chivay around 2pm. The poverty struck me immediately. Having four months in South America now, I’d seen poverty unlike anything in the States, but this was unprecedented even for me. I later told Rosa that I’d only been to larger cities in Latin America: Recife, Rio de Janeiro, Arequipa, Cusco, Bogotá. This was the first dusty, dirt-poor little town I had seen. My first pueblo.
I noted that the only goal of anybody born in this town should be to GET OUT – somehow. The entire economy revolves around tourism to Colca and agrarian ways of living off the land. What’s more dismal is that this economic mix will never change. It will never be anything besides tourism and agriculture. We had to navigate some serious Andes Mountains to get to this pueblo. The terrain is too extreme to ever build durable, high-speed freeways for large trucks or railroads in order to bring in heavy raw materials or large loads of anything. They will be isolated forever, tending to llamas and alpacas, harvesting wheat and other crops, and selling overpriced trinkets to tourists.
After lunch, we had an hour or so to settle into our hostel before the bus would take us to La Calera Hot Springs. The Colca region is littered with hot water springs and some were turned into swimming resorts. About half of our group didn’t want to go. When we arrived, our tour guide misinformed us that the pools were full and, if we still wanted to swim, we would have to wait thirty minutes or so to get in. Half of the remaining group decided to go back to the hostel. There was no way in hell I wasn’t swimming. Like a faithful lap dog, Rosa stayed with me. Karen also wanted to swim, making a party of three.
We paid the entrance fee and headed for Pool #5. We immediately got a locker and immediately entered the hot pool. It was the size of an average public swimming pool with the temperature of an average hot tub. This was zen. Heavenly. The night was cold but the water was hot. It was dusk and we enjoyed a scenery of giant mountains all around us. I enjoyed scenery of French, German, and non-Peruvian female tourists wearing skimpy bikinis.
There was a bar selling fresh juices, beer, and of course Pisco. There were servers so we didn’t even have to get out of the hot water. Latin American cultures typically have less rules / laws and less enforcement of those rules that do exist. Karen and I agreed that most pools in gringo society prohibit things like alcohol and glass. Here, we set our glasses of fresh papaya juice on the edge of the pool just like the Germans did with their beer bottles and the French did with their Pisco sours. In the hot water, Rosa rubbed my shoulders for about ten minutes while I thought about skipping the canyon in favor of hanging out here all day. I’m glad I went, but if there is a next time in Colca, I’ll be spending most of my time at La Calera.
I’d been hung over, sleep deprived, and feeling terrible all day. After swimming, I felt great. In Spanish I told Rosa I felt like a million bucks, which made no sense. Afterwards, Rosa and I joined Beto and Karen for dinner at an Irish pub in Chivay. I gorged myself with chicken and pineapple pizza, an alpaca steak platter, and a chicken sandwich. Rosa and I went to bed around 9:30pm.
We woke for the hostel’s continental breakfast at 5:30am. The morning was freezing. On our way to the canyon, our bus stopped at some even smaller, poorer pueblos along the way. Most memorable was Yanque because they had a Peruvian Independence Day festival in the city plaza. When I say festival, I mean there were 8 – 10 cholos in traditional get-up dancing around the fountain. Four or five more cholos posed with owls and llamas and four or five others sold the handmade crafts you find everywhere in Peru. Three or four busloads of tourists watched.
That was the extent of the festival, and probably the highlight to these people’s year. The folk-dance featured female dancers and male dancers dressed in women’s clothes. The tradition goes that, a long time ago, some men dressed as women and danced to fool the real girls’ fathers so they could pursue them after the dance. I tipped the dancers and cholos with the animals for the pictures we took.
These smaller pueblos further highlighted the difference between the modern world and this world. Houses are homemade. House walls and fences were built with large rocks, using mud for mortar. After the walls were built, pieces of sheet metal are placed on top of the walls to make a roof. After the sheet metal is in place, a few more large rocks are strategically placed on top to ensure the roof doesn’t move or slide off. I didn’t go inside any of these huts, but I assume they don’t have electricity or plumbing. Unfortunately, I didn’t get any pictures of these houses.
After the pueblos, we headed for Cruz del Condor (Condor Crossing) in hopes of catching a glimpse of the condors in their morning flight. The Andean Condor is a symbol of pride for many South American countries including Peru. The largest flying bird in the Western Hemisphere, the Andean Condor’s can weigh up to 35 pounds with an average wingspan of ten feet!
We were lucky to see nine or ten of these giant birds soaring above our heads and down into the canyon. We took several pictures but they all suck. The delay of the digital camera’s image-capture makes it difficult to take pictures of birds in-flight. And if you catch one, there’s no point of reference to illustrate size (a bird in a backdrop of blue sky).
Colca Canyon scenery was breathtaking and unrivaled by any mountainous views I’ve seen in Arizona, Colorado, or anywhere else in the States. Colca is impossible to take a picture of. The grandiosity takes up all of your vision. You have to turn your head left to right, up and down to see it all.
After the Condors, we stopped at a few miradores to overlook Colca Valley, a more navigable part of the canyon. The mountains were big and beautiful, but what was particularly noteworthy were the terraces. The Incas had this habit of digging steps into the sides of mountains – steps four or five feet high, so I don’t know if this made climbing the mountain any easier. For whatever reason, they dug these steps into every mountainside they could, creating green terraces all the way up the mountains. It looked cool and I can’t imagine how many Incas must have labored, and for how many years, to complete all that work. It wasn’t done in a day.
This second day, Rosa and I sat in the front seats of the bus with the best view. This was cool when viewing the Colca sites. However, it wasn’t cool for the rest of the time as I had nothing else to look at but how close the bus drove to the edge of any given cliff. The roads aren’t paved and the driver seemed to keep his tires in specific grooves in the dirt / gravel roads. These grooves are usualy located on the edge of the cliff (note: no guardrails).
The bus hauled ass along these gravel / dirt roads along the edges of cliffs hundreds or thousands of feet high. It reminded me of a time in my teens tripping acid in the country with some friends from the ghetto. On the way back at 7am or so, Dave took to the left lane of the rural highway at a high speed. As he sped around corners and over hillcrests on the left side of the double yellow line, we could’ve had a head-on collision with another car at any moment.
Dave noted aloud that we could die at any moment, to which another passenger agreed. Nobody in the car seemed to mind. I was the only one in the car from the suburbs, so I sure as hell wasn’t going to be a bitch. That was the first time I learned to let go. Sometimes, you just have to let go.
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I haven’t even finished reading this post, but had to make sure you knew I thought the llama joke was friggin hilarious. Kudos!