Colca Canyon Trek (ft Cruz del Condor)

Coming to you from a fresh three day trek is the latest blog post from Colca Canyon Trek, featuring the best photos from Cruz del Condor - With a three metre wingspan condors are one of the biggest birds in the world, weighing in at a jaw dropping 15kg they have everything you need to set your heart racing.

The first four photos demonstrate the classic beauty of the colca canyon that fans will know from old; updated with the fattest plumage, beaks, flights and sights that Cruz del Condor can bring.

Sudden mule crossings pervade this three day trek, you can`t help but feel a sense of urgency as hardcore trekkers hurl themselves to the side to avoid being sent tumbling down the hill. 

With the one of the biggest drops in any valley, the Colca canyon is twice as deep as the grand canyo - The Arizona canyon scene better watch out....Colca is the next kid on the block and it isn`t holding back any depth at 4,160 m - it`s beem hearalded by those in the valley world as "the world's deepest canyon"

Midway through the trek and the frenetic notes from Cruz del Condor disappear, relaxing into an Oasis filled day deep in the bottom of everything Colca canyon can throw at you. You better enjoy that thermal spring heated pool because you know what this is building to - day three, end of the drop and the climb to the finale

  

This three day trek, up and down all the sides of colca canyon, holds nothing back and though you can't help looking forward to the end and the all you can eat buffet of life that lies in wait it's hard not to feel that it ended too soon. Fortunately there is a one off, special edition, extra photo to satiate your colca canyon wants - two cheeky donkey's eating the load they just hauled up from the valley floor and the quick steps of their owner running to save her day's work. Should`ve fed those donkey's more - thats how Colca does it...

    

Arequipa

Arequipa, well off town in the south of Peru, was our favourite city since Cartagena, Colombia. Mainly because it is big, full of beautiful white volcanic stone buildings and very cheap 'Chinese' (read Peruvian style Chinese) restaurants where 4 soles/1 pound gets you a plate bigger than your head.

 We saw great museums; - including seeing Juanita the ice princess who was sacrificed by the Incans to appease the mountains/gods; a giant convent (it was called a monastery but was filled with nuns, tricky - it's so big it has it's own internal streets) and ate good crepes (not in the convent although we did get a great oreo milkshake in one of the nun's cells - they'd turned it into a cafe, wasn't just from a very generous nun.) We also ate so much arroz chaufa (chinese rice) that we haven't eaten any more since arequipa. It was good though.

Plaza de Armas

Trine gets her shoes expertly shined / Cool looking baby chills by a bench

Carved volcanic stone building (unseen - courtyard full of incredibly expensive alpaca clothes)

Inside the basilica

On top of the basilica, playing with bells

Silencio in the convent

Nazca

Suffering slightly from the night before the next stop was Nazca, site of the 2000 year old lines that the Nazca made for reasons unknown, basically. Still they were pretty cool so we were glad they were there.

There's not much to say about Nazca itself, a town surviving on tourism money and running flights over the lines (you can only see the lines from the air, because they're so big). They helpfully told us how all the flight operators had got together and decided to fix the price of flights and stop undercutting each other, to ensure good standards and safety. We were glad they were looking out for our interests.

After waiting in the airport for hours we get to see the tiny planes everyone gets to fly in - smallest plane I'd ever been in. It took off and landed fine, so alls well that ends well. Seriously though, they did seem safe enough - they checked every plane between flights and then they flew like crazy in very tight circles around and around the lines so that everyone got to see everything.

Some pictures of the Nazca lines below, hard to give a scale but they were big (although not as big as we thought). You can see the astronaut, the monkey (with famously curly tail), the ant and the hummingbird. There were lots more, and most of the lines are just that - lines leading like roads from one side of the desert to the other rather than shapes or pictures. But they make quite boring photos so I skipped them... 

Huacachina

We'd seen our fair share of birds, sea lions and birds and quite frankly Paracas (where we saw the Islas Ballestras from) was pretty horrible so we headed on to Huacachina, a desert oasis known for it's sandboarding.

Sandboarding in Huacachina is half sandboarding (like snowboarding but grittier and hotter) and half being driven around the sand dunes in a beach buggy with reinforced roll bars and 'professional' drivers. It also included listening to Katrina scream everytime she realised we were actually about to drive straight down the side of that very steep dune. Lots of fun, and good views.  

Spike was the only one of us who managed to stand up properly on the board - we just lay on the board and skimmed down on our stomachs. Not as cool but you did go much much faster.

Sunset over the mountains....

After watching the sunset (incredible) we thought the day hadn't been busy enough so we went to an all you can eat bbq & headed out for a late night Peruvian wineries tour, with all you can drink wine and Pisco included. Lots of fun...