Colca Canyon

Its another early morning start at 2:40am, it's weird as that's actually a sleep in compared to yesterday! We get into the bus on this Saturday to find out we are the first. It's really nice service as they gave us a poloflece blanket each, they knew we wanted to sleep. For the next hour and a bit we drove around Arequipa waiting for and picking people up. It really was an interesting way to start the day. Not many times do you see early Saturday morning with fresh eyes. We saw b**** fights, the result of a full on fight, drunk people stumbling around, people making out and some very interesting fashions.
For the remainder of the drive till breakfast, everyone tried to get some sleep.

As the drive continued I got worse and worse in the chest and when we stopped for breakfast there was only one possibility. Somewhere between the early mornings and the extreme cold and exhortation of El Misti, I had developed a chest infection. We had breakfast and there luckily there was only one stop between here and the town at the start of the trek. This town was the only stop with a chemist for something that would help me breathe.

We stopped at Cruz de la Condor where we all piled out. Normally I'd be in a t-shirt but I was wearing everything I had bought, and considering buying a new jumper. We leaned against the railing and waited for the condors to arrive. Forty of fifty minutes passed and we were feeling a little disheartened when not one but six condors flew around until we left. I guess they know about being fashionably late.

We had to leave the condors and we headed to the start of the trek, to a town called Cabanaconde. Here we picked up two types of pills for my chest and (in mums style) a banana to be kinder to my stomach, and caught up with our guide Huno ( pronounced like the card game). The whole trip we talked and he was an interesting character who was a jack of all trades and a wealth of information. He guided us through farms, pointing out types of crops, plants and people until we reached the edge of the canyon. We looked down and along the canyon, and spotted the little green oasis sitting at the bottom. Huno told us that's where lunch is and it's over 1000m below us. From here we could see the crystal turquoise and blue waters of the pools at 'the oasis.'

We made it down the mule tracks, passed occasionally only by locals with mules. The track was very rough and steep in places and it really is a credit to these animals that they can get up and down these tracks. We didn't realise they could get altitude sickness where all the locals can do is take off the load and give them water and time.
We loved the views on the 3 hour decent to the oasis, the steep sides produce some amazing scenery, but we only took a few as I was sick and Sarah had the walking poles. It was also hard to capture the deepest canyon in the world.

We took lunch at the oasis where we watched mules snacking on grass and people (who were completing the hike over more days and had finished for the day) swimming in the pools. We headed 500m up the other side of the canyon before we would flatten out for most of the rest of the day. As we walked up the hill (and still at altitude) it was really hard to breathe with the chest infection, so i was slower than usual. Therefore to help the ascent we supplemented talking with spanish lesions. It defiantly took your mind off the walk when you were running through body parts in your head and it finished as we made it to the top of the hill. This part of the walk took us to a fantastic viewpoint, an ancient lake that had dried up and had old farming terraces and trees around it and we later walked through a few villages.

As we walked around to the villages we walked a narrow path along a shear drop. I really wasn't to sure about the height but the view made it worth while. We then walked through these villages where we stopped to talk to the locals, taste the fruits and smell and talked about plants used by the locals for all sorts of applications.

We left the villages and headed down again and later arrived in San Juan in the dark. This part took us down a shear drop and we wrapped around to some waterfalls. For the rest of the walk to San Juan we followed a concrete channel supplying water for the town.
We arrived into a hostel/home stay where we got a small room and headed to the kitchen to converse with Huno and our hosts. Here we joked with the family as they prepared dinner for 20 or 30 hikers and themselves. When I asked what meat was for dinner that he was preparing, He replied with one of the few English words he knew, 'donkey,' followed by a grin and a laugh. It was actually llama, but we continued to say it was donkey to all the others. Him and his wife joked about each other the whole time in Spanish, which I actually understood some of.

Dinner was great, with both llama and chicken, and after this we crashed out. Tomorrow was a sleep in, up at 3:45am.