Colca Canyon | Stowaway Travel Writing & Editorial Services

Colca Canyon: Part 1 can be found here.

Every single town in South America has a central plaza, often called the Plaza de Armas or Plaza Mayor. It’s the colonial influence–the Spanish built the main church in a central plaza and a grid system of streets emanating from it. (I’m not sure what it’s like in Brazil, where the Portuguese held power.) Even tiny towns have a central plaza.

Condor takes wing

Nice little backdrop to your church

The one in Chivay has been renovated in recent years, and it’s a pleasant place to spend some time while you’re, say, grinding your teeth in frustration because guides and hotel staff alike assured you that you could Skype in this town but it turns out even the internet centers are so slow that they don’t download Skype and the call centers don’t make international calls and you have a phone date on your birthday with your parents that you have to cancel via basic HTML email. Just for example.

Inside the church of Chivay

The night of my two-day, one-night tour, most people opted to go to Pizzeria El Horno, a large restaurant only open for dinners, which caters to tour groups on a nightly basis. Our group got the head table, right across from the tiny stage for the musicians, and right in front of the bit of floor used by the dancers. The food was mediocre to fair, but the entertainment was terrific.

The band, on the tiniest stage I’ve ever seen

This was a peña, a popular Peruvian dance hall event (as with most local traditions here, there’s a range of peñas, from the small and local to the large and touristy–guess where this fell). The band leader called out the names of the dances and then away they went. Some of the dances were clearly based on important traditions, like one involving agricultural symbols and movements. Others just looked fun.

The dancers wore different outfits for each dance

Probably the one that had us all the most entranced was the condor dance, which involved the man moving like a condor flies, stealing an onion from the woman, taking a bite, and falling to the floor on his back, at which point the woman takes out a strip of cloth and beats him with it, eventually putting her skirts over his face to revive him. He gets up and it repeats with her stealing the onion, etc., and then he picks her up and spins her around until they’re both dizzy. Probably there is more to it than that, but it was a sight to see.

By the end of the night, the dancers had dragged half the audience onto the dance floor for a big circle dance, and then they put costumes on people. The kids in the crowd loved every second of it.

The next morning, we got to see actual condors fly. (I did not notice any onions, beatings, or resurrections.) Condors are magnificent birds; they’re the heaviest airborne bird, and their wingspan can reach 3 meters, just under that of the albatross. They mate for life (males sometimes commit suicide if their mates die first), and they can live until they’re 75 years old. Because they have such a long lifespan, their aging process is not dissimilar to ours; they spend two years in the nest and are able to start reproducing at age 15. When they’re young, they’re brown, and they gain black feathers when they’re older; males grow a white collar around their necks.

Stunning sight

Young condors–one of them stayed huddled on that rock the whole hour I was there

Apparently, the Andean condor here has just one predator–a hummingbird! Hummingbirds are very territorial, and if condors get too close to this one type of hummingbird’s food supply, the hummingbird will use its long beak to go for the condors’ eyes. Never would’ve guessed it.

Because of their weight, condors try not to fly unless they have a little help, so their most active time of day is in the mornings, when the thermal drafts of the canyon are strongest. They don’t fly in the afternoons or evenings. Instead, they stay in the nests they build in holes in the walls of the canyon. We were lucky to see at least 10 condors soaring on the wind, against the glorious backdrop of the green, rugged mountains.

The adults flew above and away from the young ones, sometimes dived below (to get to a nest or a snack?), and only occasionally stopped by to check on the young ones. They must not have been too young.

(A woman at my hostel in Cusco informed me that the reason that particular site is so popular for viewing condors is that the national reserve staff push animal carcasses over the edge of the canyon, drawing the non-hunting birds. If that’s true, it means the animals aren’t quite as wild as I’d thought, but I don’t think it diminishes the experience.)

Happy birthday to me

When I asked some people in my group to take my birthday photo for me, they burst into “Happy Birthday” in Spanish, which was embarrassing but sweet. Later, the group took a one-hour walk along the canyon’s edge, taking more photos, learning more about condors, and appreciating being away from the crowds at the Mirador del Condor.

Colca Canyon

Little white bees that apparently do not sting and leave in these holes.

Little white bees that apparently do not sting and live in these holes

We had a quick lunch in Chivay and then began the journey back to Arequipa, this time with no stops. My last glimpse of the Colca Canyon was of a bright yellow flower swaying in the breeze on the edge of a cliff, while the green mountains stood watch behind.

We took an alternate route back through the canyon and got to see the river up close

There were a lot of pretty yellow, red, silvery, and red flowers along the canyon

There were a lot of pretty yellow, red, silvery, and purple flowers along the canyon

Short-term tours are a risky prospect. They’re usually organized to see one particular attraction, so that’s the focus, but all tours add stops along the way to make you feel you’ve got good value for your money. The main risk lies in the guide—will she hurry everyone along to keep to a strict schedule, then linger far too long at overpriced souvenir stands; or will he appreciate that everyone wants to take photos and admire the scenery, and not pressure everyone to get going? There are other risks, too—will the food be decent, will the transportation be comfortable, will the other people on the tour be fun?

The road to Colca Canyon

4800 meters above sea level

I’m not a long-term tour kind of traveler; I like my independence too much to follow a guide around for 8 days in a row and stick to their schedule. But there are some attractions that are extremely difficult or expensive to see on my own, and that’s when I turn to short-term tours, like visiting the Cu Chi Tunnels outside Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam or driving out to the Škocjan Caves in Slovenia. For the weekend of my birthday this year, I decided to risk a short-term tour to the Colca Canyon in southern Peru. I lucked out—it was a good tour.

Llama crossing

The best part of the tour (other than the stunning, jaw-dropping, give-up-on-adjectives-because-this-country-is-too-beautiful scenery) was the guide, Elizabeth. She does this tour multiple times a week, gripping a microphone in one hand and the rail of the careening bus in the other, but she’s a pro, never giving any indication that this was tiring work or that she was bored repeating the same information over and over.

Coca tea–wake up!

She also asked the driver to stop multiple times along the road in the national park, and let us have more time to take photos than most other bus groups I saw on the same road. Granted, this meant we arrived in the valley town of Chivay an hour later than scheduled, but that didn’t affect anything, because we had a cushion of time in town anyway. Elizabeth also gave the entire tour in two languages—she’d give a little speech in Spanish for the 23 Spanish speakers on the bus, and then she’d repeat the whole thing in English for the 3 of us who couldn’t get past “gracias.” Impressive!

Piles of stones for wishes

Back to that stunning scenery: The land around the canyon is a vast, brown desert, and it was surprising to see the landscape change drastically into lush, terraced farmland after an hour or two of driving. “Colca” roughly translates to “granary” in Quechua, and that’s exactly how the Incas used this region when they conquered it—as the bread basket of the empire. Before the Incas got there, two ethnic groups populated the valley, building their terraces first at the top of canyon, the better to look down and see any advancing enemies, and then moving farther down into the canyon as their population grew (and later, as the Incas demanded more taxes in the form of crops).

Chivay and some terraces from the road into town

By the time the Spanish arrived, about 60,000 people lived in the canyon. After only four years of their “mine all the gold, import all the diseases, take food from the locals” approach, the local population dwindled to 45,000. Today, 10,000 people live in the area, 7,000 of them concentrated in the town of Chivay. Agriculture and tourism tie for the main industries in the area.

Terraced farming in the Colca Canyon

Agriculture, as Elizabeth described it to us, includes not just the terraces of grains and vegetables, but the plains populated with llamas and alpacas. Both llamas and alpacas have been domesticated for hundreds of years. They’re herded across the vast desert terrain and along the craggy tops of the canyon walls, and every so often they’re sheared, and the hair is used for super warm clothing and rugs.

Alpacas

There’s also an animal called a vicuña, which is wild and protected by the Peruvian government. They’re the same type of animal as the llama and the alpaca, a camelid, but they’re much rarer. Their hair is even softer and the clothes made from it even more expensive. (Apparently, there’s a hefty fine for anyone without a license who tries to shear one, and even a jail sentence.) The road leading to the canyon is dotted with signs warning drivers to decrease their speed, because vicuñas graze here.

Vicunas grazing on the reserve

One of the ways to cope with the incredibly high altitude of the Andes is to chew on coca leaves. Coca leaves, of course, are the stimulant used in Coca-Cola (they say they don’t use the leaves anymore, but Elizabeth said Peru sells thousands of tons of coca to the company every year, so…), and also one of the ingredients used in producing cocaine. Locals drink coca tea and chew on the leaves, to aid in digestion, alertness, and access to oxygen. Elizabeth showed us how to do it—roll up at least 9 leaves around some ash, which acts as a catalyst, stick it in your back teeth, and chew for at least 20 minutes. It made the left side of my face numb. I suppose I did feel a little more alert, but it’s probably not a habit I’ll pick up.

It’s like nature’s Novocaine

Oh and in answer to the other questions about short-term tours: the food was pretty good but a little overpriced, the bus seats were a little small but otherwise it was comfortable, and the people were nice.

Next week, in Part 2: an elegant central plaza, traditional dances at a peña, and condors soaring through the mountains