Flight on the Condors

From Arequipa we headed out to the Colca Canyon on a 2 day tour. The Colca Canyon is the worlds deepest canyon at 3400m. The landscape here is very dramatic, much like you would expect the moon to look like. Along the way you pass the odd oasis fed by snow melt from the Andes. It’s damn cold up here, the highest point we reached in our journey was 4800m. The locals wear Alpaca and Llama wool clothing to keep warm. The women wear the most brightly coloured skirts which are rather oddly complimented by a bowler hat to keep here heads warm. We saw lots of Llama’s, Alpaca’s and Bequinias along the way. Bequinias are a relative of Llama’s and Alpacas but are endangered as they have the best wool and were almost hunted to extinction.

We spent a night in the town of Chivay, soaked in some thermal pools there to defrost then headed out to the Canyon at 6am the next morning. The Canyon is very impressive and is home to Condors. These are one of the largest flying birds and have a wingspan of up to 4m. We waited very patiently in the freezing wind to get a view of one of these huge birds. Not surprisingly they don’t like gliding round in the wind, so we only saw a couple of Condors but they were very impressive.

Next we headed down to Puno, a town on the shore of Lake Titicaca. It’s a very pleasant little town that gets very cold at night due to the fact that it is 3500m above sea level and right beside a big cold lake. We took a boat out to the Uros floating islands which are home to 1200 people whose ancestors have lived on these islands they have made from reeds for the last 1,000 of years. The whole experience is a bit too touristy but is very interesting and worth a visit.

We are off to Bolivia tomorrow but we’re looking forward to returning to Peru to do the Inca Trail in 3 weeks.