Colca Canyon, Peru

The garden of our lodgings at Colca Canyon!
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Colca Canyon is this massive canyon on the Colca River in southern Peru. At twice the depth of the Grand Canyon in the USA, it is one of the deepest canyons in the world (over 3,200m for those interested in those sort of stats). The Colca Valley is a colorful andean valley with towns founded in Spanish Colonial times and still inhabited by decendents of the Collaguas and the Cabanas. The local people still maintain ancestral traditions in the way they wear their traditional dress, particularly hats. The entire scenery is so majestic that it makes you feel as insignificant as a grain of sand on a beach. The terraces on both sides of the canyon tell the story of thousands of years of habitation and are still in use today.

Standing on the edge of the abyss
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The Colca River starts high in the Snfrd at Condorama Crucero Alto and changes its name to Majes, and then to Camana before reaching the Pacific Ocean. The small town of Chivay, where we had lunch, is on the upper Colca River. As the canyon deepens downriver, a series of small villages is spread out over the approximately 60km between Chivay and the village of Cabanaconde. But one of the prime reasons that people visit this area isn't for the majesty of the scenery itself, its for the Andean Condors that grace the skies between its peaks. You can go see them for yourselves at http://www.imagesandmusic.nl/dhtml/Condors.htm They are truly spectacular and almost seem to perform for the throngs of tourists that flock to see them.

Colca Canyon, the majesty of the Andes

Flying like the condors .... NOT!
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There was a bit of a mix up in the accommodation arrangements while we were there. It would seem that GAP had changed the itinerary and booked us into Colca Canyon for 2 nights instead of only one. This meant that we would only have one night in Arequipa. A number of us were not that impressed with this, not so much because of the accommodations we had at Colca (because they were amazing to say the least!) but because we were not advised of the change, and had expected to stay in Arequipa for 2 nights and not one. Anyway the upshot is that the few of us who asked about it were shipped off back to Arequipa for the second night. That I could easily take because Arequipa is a city you could explore for more than a week and never even touch the sides!

Some shots of the Colca Canyon
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I hope that the photos I took of the Colca area go a little way to do it some justice, because it truly highlights the majesty, colour and culture of the Andes.