On Monday night Anna and I farewelled Cusco and took an overnight bus to Arequipa. There we were lucky enough to get the last room in a great hostel and spent the day planning the last week of our trip. We also managed to visit a museum and see “the ice princess” a frozen inca sacrifice which was found on top of a volcano. She really is frozen rather than mummified by the cold temperature and dry atmosphere like the other ones we have seen and they had lots of artifacts on display which made it a really interesting visit.
Much of the rest of the day was spent focused on food. We treated ourselves to a cooked breakfast (ham and cheese rolls aren’t doing it for us any more), had lunch in a rooftop restaurant with views of the volcanoes which surround Arequipa and found a chocolate shop which made really great chocolate milkshakes – believe it or not the first of our trip! We even managed to order in some Chinese for dinner.
Arequipa is over 1,000 meters lower than Cusco and it made a real temperature difference. We spent the day wandering around in t-shirts which seems slightly surreal with a background of snowcapped mountains.
On Wednesday morning we jumped on another tour bus and headed off for a tour of Colca Canyon, which is one of the key reasons people go to Arequipa. It was then that we realized we have become a little tour jaded. After all our tours, we just couldn’t summon up much enthusiasm for more photos of llamas, alpacas, vicunas, desert and mountains. This made the roughly 6 hour bus trip fairly boring! Also as we rose significantly in altitude, the cold began to get us down.
But at last we arrived at Chiva. This small town is the gateway to the canyon and is basically there to serve that purpose – it is small, dusty, full of hostels and not much more. We had a good lunch, then a little free time in which Anna and I explored the town and confirmed its boring status. There were the usual markets which contain all the same things that we have seen time and time again, the girls in traditional dress holding an alpaca wanting to be paid for a photo and not much else. However, things did manage to get more interesting.
Being surrounded by volcanoes, Chiva also has hot springs and we headed down to them. An hour in 38 degree water and we (and our trek sore muscles) were feeling much happier. We headed back to town and went to dinner at a local restaurant complete with entertainment. There was a small traditional band, pan pipes, drums and various guitar like instruments and a pair of dancers. They demonstrated a range of traditional dances, each time getting people from the crowd to participate. The French couple on our table who had been sharing a jug of pisco sour with me and Anna were some of the first.
The final dance was one they do for Corpus Christi. Ever since we arrived in Cusco we have been seeing the strange knitted masks that they wear, think a balaclava crossed with the V for Vendetta mask only knitted and in bright colours. Anyway, the dance seemed to involve the couple taking turns lying on the floor while the other whipped them. It was pretty funny, then Anna got pulled up. I don’t think I have laughed so hard as that in ages as Anna took her turn whipping and being whipped by the strangely masked man to music. Poor Anna was laughing so hard she could barely stand. Then, just as she thought she had finished, he decided to pick her up over one shoulder. The ensuing chase as he tried to pick her up and Anna tried to pick him up, nimbly getting out of the way was so funny I had an asthma attack!
After a relatively decent night’s sleep we got up early (we are very much sick of the 5am starts) to head out to the canyon and see the condors. This was the real reason for our trip and after a couple of stops to admire the view – the canyon is spectacular but it was freezing – we made to the condor lookout. We had been told recently by someone that they went all that way and didn’t see any but we were lucky enough to see quite a few. In fact at one point there were 5 circling overhead.
Condors are seriously big birds, with wing spans of around 3m they can weigh up to 14kgs and have been known to live for 70 years! The immature birds are dark brown, but once they reach adulthood, they are black with white feathers on the back of their wings and around their necks. One of the immature birds was obviously a bit into the show and kept buzzing the crowd flying about 5 meters above causing gasps from those assembled below.
Obviously this is a major tourist attraction and there were lots of people there, including the New Zealand couple who we continue to run into on our trip. But apparently numbers are down hugely on previous years because of the economic crisis, so I guess that has been good for us.
We stayed for over an hour watching the condors wheel above, below and in front of us before walking along the canyon for awhile. It is massive, at its widest over 2km across and 4km deep. The vegetation is really nice, lots of cactuses along with many flowering plants. We have been a bit deprived of flowers on this trip seeing as it is winter so it was a really nice change. They also have these huge nectar eating insects which could almost be hummingbirds with the size of their noses. They love the colour blue so Anna spent a lot of time fending them off her entirely blue outfit.
The day ended with a long bus ride back to Arequipa. We may be a little over the whole tour thing but seeing the condors was a real highlight of the whole trip.
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