As I mentioned in the last blog we decided that we could do Colca Canyon without the help and cost of a tour company and guide. Colca Canyon was a must for our visit to Arequipa as it is the second deepest canyon in the world!!

To get to Colca Canyon we took a public bus to Cabanacondor from Arequipa which took about 6.5 hours and passed through the mountainous landscape around Mount Chachani.

We checked into our nice but old looking hostel at the top of the town. We were hungry so decided to try some corn encrusted chicken pieces in the hotel restaurant .... not the nicest lunch! We hadn't planned to start the trek down into the canyon until the following day as we wanted to set off early in the morning and achieve the trekking circuit in two days instead of the standard three. What we hadn't realised is that Cabanacondor is possibly one of the most boring towns on the planet so once we had walked out to the viewpoint to check out the canyon and where we would be trekking there was literally nothing to do except hang out at the hotel. This was made more difficult by the fact that a wedding was happening directly across the street from our hotel and the music and microphone were so loud it sounded like they were in our room. This went on from 2pm-11pm and I can safely say all Peruvian music sounds exactly the same... wedding music anyway haha!

The next morning we packed up the day pack with the bare essentials and walked to the start of the route we wanted to take. This took about 40 minutes and was a bit further than we expected but we soon found the track leading steeply down the side of the canyon.

Getting to the bottom of the canyon took about 2 hours of knee crunching stomping. At the bottom we sat down next to the river for a bit and had a snack ready for our trek halfway up the other side to two small villages. As we were walking up to the villages there was really loud dynamite explosions going off where they were blasting rock to build a road. It was a bit disconcerting and when we got to the first village and sat down for a coke we could see rocks and boulders tumbling down the canyon from the blasts!!

The two villages turned out to be tiny and dead. We were hoping to grab a cheap lunch here but it soon became apparent that would have to wait until we reached the oasis where we were to spend the night. Getting to the oasis involved climbing over some gravel landslides across the path halfway up the canyon which was fairly terrifying and the sort of thing your mum would tell you not to do ;-)!

We reached the oasis at about 2pm. As we climbed down we could see a few hostels with swimming pools filled with spring water, it looked like heaven! Unfortunately the accommodation was not that heavenly and the first place we took a look at was absolutely horrible and really dirty so we moved onto a second. It was a very basic bamboo hut with two single beds and a mud floor but an improvement so we stayed and were fed a lunch of vegetable soup followed by what looked like the soup with chicken added and some rice. The skies typically clouded over she we arrived at the oasis but we risked a dip in the pool before relaxing with our books and cards until dinner of soup and spaghetti at 7.30pm. We were the only people in the hostel who weren't part of the 4 huge tour groups staying at the hostel and we had managed to get the bamboo hut right next to the meeting point so all night we heard groups getting up and starting ridiculously early treks back up the mountain.

We were fully awake by 5am and at 6.30am there was still no one to ask about breakfast so we ate our last cereal bars and started the 1100m trek back up the canyon. It took about 2.5 hours and wasn't too hard except for the last hour when the oxygen started to thin out a bit and breathing became tougher. At the top we ate a breakfast of instant coffee, bread and eggs at a grubby little cafe (the only one in town) before heading back to the hostel for showers and more food. We spent the rest of the day relaxing, checking we hadn't missed anything that would make the town more interesting and walking back out to the viewpoint just because we lacked anything else to do!!

After a good nights sleep we were up early for the smelly cheap bus ride to Chivay where we caught our connection back to Puno, 8 hours in all. The next day we got on the 8 hour bus to Cuzco .... Except it broke down and ended up taking 10 hours. With no lunch this wasn't much fun!! Anyway we are in Cuzco now and off trekking tomorrow.

I'll blog again soon.

Alice
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