El Condor Pasa
The tour to the Colca Canyon, as it turned out, was an old-age style guided bus tour and not a walking trek of a sort; Though the participants were young travelers, this tour is easily suitable for much older people, and can be attended by them as well - you hardly get off the bus to get photos, and the amount of walking involved is not worth mentioning.
We started by leaving Arequipa towards the Colca Valley (the canyon is ctually only a small part of the fertile valley formed by the Colca river). This involved around half a day on which the bus climbed from Arequipa towards the altiplano - the high plans of the Andes. The area is a series of arid planes, with semi-desert characteristics, but rather cold due to its height (on the highest point, the Mirador De Los Volcanoes, we reached some 4800 meters). On the planes there are herds of the local cameloids - Vicuñas, Alpacas, and - of course - Llamas. We observed the cute animals, and then continued up with the road till we reached the lookout I mentioned before. On this lookout we stopped to have a look at the surrounding mountains - it looks like all the area is at the centre of an old volcanic caldera, which lost its activity long ago, and everywhere you look you are surrounded by old volcanoes. The most famous of them is one called El Misty, which dominates the town of Arequipa and supplies most of the stones for its buildings - Arequipa is built of an off-white volcanic material called Sallir or something like that; most of it comes from El-Misty (which, with 5800 meters, is constantly covered by clouds, hence its name) which has a perfect cone shape - the best looking volcanoe of all the ones around
After looking at the mountains we descended to a village called Chivay, which is located at the centre of the Colca valley. The valley is very fertile, and is full of terraes for agriculture. We stopped at the village, and after lunh went for half-an-hour walk at some ruins behind the village - some pre-inca cultures left a small amfitheatre and some guard posts around. Not too impressive, but still gives the local kids a nice playground. Then we had to rest from the difficult day, and went to some hot springs they have around.
The hot springs were really fun, and we stayed there for some 2 hours, bathing in hot water (around 40 degress) while the outside temperature drops gradually, as the night approaches. On the evening we were to see a “folkloric show”, which was of course the lassical tourist trap. Me, Idan and Sol didn’t approve of this, so we went to different restaurant in town, and had an excellent (and much cheaper) dinner, while avoiding two Indians dancing and singing in front of us while we eat. I heard from other people that the show was nice - if you like two Indians to dance in front of you while you try to eat. Anyhow, we went to sleep early, because the following day wee had a wakeup at 05:00, to go and spot the Condors in the canyon early in the morning.
The stuf at the hotel didn’t actually expect us to wake up when they did, because as Sol and I went to have our breakfast - around half ast five - nothing was ready. We waited some 15 minuts for the water to boil and for the bread to arrive at that early hour, and later eaten pretty fast in order to get on the bus at 0600. We left Chivay a bit later, and headed towards the canyon. To our surprise the bus stopped at every village on the way, trying to show us some o,d churches, local markets, and things like that. We got pissed off, and tryed to figure out what was going on, when our guide explained to us that the morning is too cold and they are waiting for it to warm a bit so the condors will actually show up. Great organization. Then one french guy in the group suddenly remembered that his sister or girlfriend or something like that had been there for 7 times and never saw a Condor, which of course cheered up everybody.
We reached the canyon, and went off the bus at one small lookout on its rim, from which we walked some 20 minutes for another lookout. The canyon, indeed, is vbery deep. It was, though, lesds impressive then I expected - neither a massive geological structure like the Grand Canyon in Arizona, nor a deep vertical wall like in the Judean Desert. It simply looks like a deep valley between two very high mountains, both of them green and covered by vegetation (rather then the uncovered rocks I expected), and down below you can see the river, flowing deep and fast.
Then came the condors. In a perfect timing, rising in circles from down below, floating on hot air tubes (pretty much the usual for big birds) they rose from the canyon, and when reaching our height just turned their wings and flew over us, really low, so we could get close look at them - both from above and from below, and even face to face.
Facing a wild condor leaves you in awe. This huge bird looks like a small airplane. With its all-brown body, except for the white collar on the grown ups, this massive animal is truely impressive. As they rose from the canyon, circling slowly against the mountainside, and then going up towards the sun and finally turning over us and going to look for food, I could easily understand the mythical position these majestic birds acquired in all the Andean cultures. They were numerous - first coming in couples, then one by one every few minutes, just to keep s busy. I spotted two babies (about the size of Goliath, but with no white collars and their feathers a bit more greyish then the others), and while waiting for them even saw another nice show - a small colibri (did you know that this is the only bird in the world that can actualy stand in midair and even fly backwards) was eating from some flowers, and we all just looked at it when there were no condors - but most of the time, there were. Heaps of them. Even the guide was really surprised, she told us it is extremely rare to see them, certainly in such proximity. Sometimes, it is good to have luck.
Finlly, after an hour and haf or so, we had had enough. We returned for our bus, which on the way back stopped at one point at the side of the road just to show us some ancient graves dug above us on the hillside, and the agricultural terraces at the valley below. Maybe it was nice, but I didn’t really pay attention to it - I was somewhat tired and still busy with the Condors. I slept most of the way back, and around 17:00 reached Arequipa.
