Condors In The Colca Canyon

A trip out to the Colca Canyon is on most travellers’ must-do lists while staying in Arequipa, but Michaela plays a blinder by finding a 2-day tour which is linear rather than circular and ends in the place which is, handily, our next destination anyway. So we leave Arequipa in the morning sunshine with the canyon and its resident condors in our minds, hoping we get lucky enough to see one or two.

We head now back up into high altitudes, in fact at no time in the next nineteen days will we be below 3,400 metres above sea level. We’ve dubbed this part of the trip “the cold section” as evenings and night times will dip to zero or below even though sun block is still called for during the day. In fact, as we discover on the first of the two days, when the mountain wind blows while the sun is shining, it’s entirely possible to feel hot and cold at the same time.

Travelling through this high altitude terrain is an entertainment in itself: the huge country of the soaring Andes, desert like rocky plateaux, then areas of pampas and high level wetlands where the giant Andean coot shares the waters with ibis and ducks. But in terms of fauna it’s the camelids which dominate, with large numbers of llama and alpaca roaming their territory, and herds of their lesser known relative the vicuña moving in numbers.

One of our calls is at Patapampa, the highest point on the 2-day journey at 4910m, where we get to see and touch one of the weirdest plants we’ve ever seen. Yes it’s green, yes it’s kind of moss like in appearance, but it feels like rock to the touch. This is the yareta, one of the slowest growing plants on Earth, gaining just 1.5 centimetres per year yet able to form pads up to 6m in diameter – the specimen in this photograph is around 200 years old, and still going strong. It can only survive at altitudes between 3,500 and 5,250 metres.

Our overnight stop is at the mountain village of Chivay with its numerous statues depicting Inca and Quechua traditions, where houses appearing to be only half built huddle in the narrow streets around the plaza, everything looking like it’s designed to cope with the cold of midwinter. Incongruously, in the midst of all these people wrapped in layers of alpaca wool clothing, women in traditional dress and men in cowboy hats, where Quechua is spoken much more than Spanish, the music in the coffee bar could be straight out of my own personal collection – Pink Floyd, Steely Dan, Tom Petty, Dire Straits.

Michaela’s discovery of this two day option turns out to be extremely budget friendly too, accommodation and food in Chivay is at the raised eyebrow end of the low cost scale. Our room in the village, basic but definitely acceptable, costs £16 (about 21USD) including breakfast for two.

Just after 6:30 next morning, exactly zero degrees, we’re back on the mountain roads headed for the canyon. It’s a staggering sight too, even though we only enter the early stages of its length, long before it takes on its greatest dimensions. Colca Canyon is the sixth deepest canyon in the world, deeper than the Grand Canyon, its sides 2000m high at its most dramatic point, the bottom 2000m above sea level, the edges 4000m, stretching in total some 70 kilometres end to end.

The canyon is a magnificent example of our fabulous world, but we’re really here in the hope of catching sight of the Andean condors – and we get incredibly, sensationally lucky. Having been warned numerous times that it’s pot luck whether any condors will show, this morning turns out to be perfect conditions, a clear sunny day with little wind and perfect thermals in the deep canyon. The result is beyond spectacular.

After patiently waiting a while, the first condor or two start to appear, but then, as our time on the canyon’s edge unfolds, it’s as if one condor has told the rest how good today’s thermals are, and, magnificently, several take to the wing. At one point we count nine of these majestic, giant gliding birds circling above our heads. The whole experience is truly spine tingling, a fantastic sight which is hard to walk away from; the sight of so many gliding across the canyon, their giant wings spread to their full 3-metre span, is way beyond what we’d hoped for.

From the canyon it’s another five hours to our next destination, Puno, which is in fact our last stop in Peru before we cross the border. Our hopes for Puno weren’t too high, but yet again Peru exceeds expectations and hands over a welcoming, tidy little town on the shores of Lake Titicaca. Puno manages somehow to be both attractive and modest, its plazas filled with locals chatting in the sunshine before the thermometer drops to zero again.

The main plaza, neat and tidy and as ever home to the town’s cathedral, is fully pedestrianised, streets gently sloping from here down to the shores of the mighty lake. There’s a feeling of frontier here too, for just across the water part way across the lake, Peru gives way to Bolivia. In the last couple of hours before the sun drops below the mountains, ladies sit in the warmth of the sun, already wrapped in coats in anticipation of the evening chill.

As the ladies of Puno sit chatting on benches, the plaza fills with schoolchildren in red and black uniforms filing home. But there’s one child, a young girl aged about eight, who isn’t in uniform and isn’t mixing with the others. She sits on the paving in the middle of the plaza, feeding, and surrounded by, pigeons, encouraging them to sit on her lap, on her outstretched arms and even on her head, oblivious to any onlookers. When a small dog chases away her friends, she looks forlorn; when they fly back she smiles the sweetest of smiles, just to herself. After a while she is done, and skips away from the plaza in overt happiness. Are we watching an inherited love of Pachamama? Who is this little girl with pigeons as her friends rather than children? Who is she? What is her story? 

As in Chivay last night, there is noticeably less English spoken here than in previous towns and cities, and the local tongue has changed from Quechua to Aymara, the second of Peru’s official indigenous languages. And despite the presence of the famous lake, there’s no mistaking the high altitude: again the air is thin and we find ourselves repeating some of the acclimatisation process. We can’t treat this thing lightly, especially with almost three weeks of it ahead of us.

Darkness falls quickly before 6pm, the sunset is but a fleeting splash of pastel shades. The cold takes its grip at speed. Even in the daytime hours when the radiation levels from the hot sun need careful attention, turn into a shaded street and we’re reaching for our coats once more. This is a world where we can get sunburnt whilst feeling the cold, where the low oxygen levels mean that water boils at 84 degrees, where the simple act of breathing is an art to be relearned. We are now in the Altiplano, a region almost unique in the world – more on that as we move deeper into its unusual territory.

We’re not yet anywhere near the highest point to which the rest of this journey will take us and it’ll be almost three weeks before we once more breathe air with oxygen levels at our norm. Yet next, way up here at 3,500m, we’re poised to journey out on to a huge expanse of water ….Lake Titicaca awaits…