La Luna de Miel Larga

After recovering from New Years Eve and seeing a bit of the Sacred Valley in the Cusco area (see Christmas Travels around Cusco and the Sacred Valley post), we hopped on a night bus down to Arequipa to check out the Colca Canyon, the deepest canyon in the world (well, actually another nearby canyon is a couple hundred feet deeper, but they’re both twice as deep as the Grand Canyon, so you get the idea). We stayed in Arequipa at a really helpful hotel named La Casa de Mi Abuela (My Grandmother’s House) who also run a travel agency through which we booked a Colca Canyon tour. We had a day to kill in Arequipa, so we went to the local university museum where they have one of the Incan ice mummies on display (usually Juanita, but we saw Sarita), then we spent a lot of time wandering around a local monastery which was absolutely huge and beautiful.The next morning we headed off to the Colca Canyon, passing over the mountains and hitting the highest point so far in Peru, at around 4800 meters. At the pass, we stopped to make an offering to the mountain gods (done with three perfect coca leaves upon which you pile stones). We were chewing coca leaves on the way up to the pass, to help with the altitude. On the drive we saw a lot of vicuñas, which are a wild camelid which lives at high altitudes and has the finest fur of all the camelids, going for around $500/kilo. In the Colca Canyon we stayed at a nice hotel in a very small local town (Coporaque), going on a quick group hike and visiting the nearby hot springs on our first evening. The next morning we took a hike up to some pre-Incan tombs, where we found a lot of pottery shards scattered around among the bodies and skeletons that had been pulled out of the tombs. We also spent some time in the afternoon in Chivay, the capital of the Canyon and a town about 8 km from Coporaque.

The next day we joined back up with a tour and headed to see the condors soaring through the canyon at the famous Cruz del Condor. Of course, when we got to the lookout, there was so much fog we could barely see 20 ft. We headed back to another lookout to wait and see if any condors would show up, but after an hour or so with no appearances we started the long ride back to Arequipa for one last day before Kathie and Silas had to catch their plane back to Lima, and Chris and Aviva headed down to Chile.

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1. Xochitl Says:
   January 21st, 2008 at 8:59 pm

   Hola Aviva y Chris,

   Que hermosa fotos!! WOW!! Mi encantan!
   Felicidades en todo que han logrado.

   ~Xochitl