Treking in the Colca Canyon

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We arrived very tired in Arequipa after a massively delayed night bus from Nazca and our initial thoughts were to curl up and spend the day in bed.

However, luckily for us we had managed to find the best hostel ever (House of the penguins) which has the nicest dutch owner and very comfy clean rooms (with the added bonus of peanut butter, cereal and yougurt for breakfast which was heavenly after weeks and weeks of jam and bread and eggs. Mmmmmmmm peanut butter....)

She also helped us find a brilliant cheap tour into the Colca Canyon (which is the worlds deepest canyon, located a few hours outside Ariquipa). We decided to take 3 days and trek down to the bottom and then back up again. 3 days including private transport, food, accomodation and a guide for 150 soles ($50) - best bargain ever.

The first day of treking was an early start of 4am pick up, then journey out to Cruz del Condor where,as the name suggests, there are loads of condors who live in the caves here and spend the morning circling before heading out afar to look for food. The condors are massive (about 3 metre wingspan) and can live to 80 years old. Magnus likes to call them small airplanes. After checking out the condors we headed over to a village called Cabaconde where we had a bit of food before heading out to the canyon. The first day of trekking was about 4 hours steep downhill which was blooming hard work on the knees and then 1.5 hours back up on the other side of the canyon. We both found this day harder (even though it was supposed to be the easy day!). At night we arrived to a tiny tiny village called Cosnirhua (we were the only foreigners there) and slept in a typical peruivan style house (i.e. a concrete block).

Day two started well when we were served gorgeous chocolate pancakes for breakfast (very odd when in the middle of nowhere!) The hike was a couple of hours downhill to the Oasis at the bottom of the canyon where we could chill in the pools and eat lunch. Then came what was billed as the hardest bit of the trek - the uphill climb back out of the Canyon. We were so worried that it would take us ages that we set of an hour early expecting it to take us 4 hours, but instead we proudly made it in 2.45hr which was blooming good effort on our parts. The shower we had that night was by far the best and hottest shower ever 😊

The 3rd day was incredible chilled, lounged around in hot springs in the sunshine to soothe our aching legs and best buffet lunch so far - yum!

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