Life After the Inca Trail: Colca Canyon & Lake Titicaca

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Cuzco just wasn't the same once Katherine had left and we decided it was finally time to move on, not to the Amazon as originally planned, but to Arequipa for a quick visit to Colca Canyon, the deepest canyon in the world. (Actually the second deepest, but that just doesn´t sound as good does it!!)

When we'd originally planned this trip, overnight bus journeys had been something we'd hoped to avoid by flying, but with the extortionate costs of plane tickets the reality has turned out somewhat different. So we apprehensively took our first overnight bus from Cuzco to Arequipa and were pleasantly suprised. One of the first things you notice about South Americans is that they love noise. It is impossible to find a quiet hotel and even long distance overnight bus journeys are unnecessarily noisy. We boarded the bus at 9pm, armed with our sleeping bags and ready to make the most of the semi-cama (semi reclining seats) facilities. However, the hostess had different ideas and we were subjected to three hours of noise! First there was a 20 minute announcment in Spanish about bus rules, followed by the onboard meal - fair enough. Then out came the onboard bingo and Paul slowly started to turn into the incredible hulk! The final straw was the movie they started at 11pm - Big Momma’s House 2, in Spanish!! Despite all this I managed to sleep fairly well, but then that’s the Inca Trail for you.

We spent just one day in Arequipa, enough time to book a Colca Canyon Tour and take in a bit of culture. We visited the museum there which is home to Juanita, a fully preserved mummy. She is believed to have been a human sacrifice made by the Incas to the Mountain Gods. Her body is so well preserved because she’s been buried in snow for 800 years (even her internal organs are fully intact - yuck!) She is kept in a glass refrigator and is on full view for all to see - the sight of her will haunt me for weeks!

We spent two days and one night at Colca Canyon and opted for a non-standard tour with an overnight stay in Yanque, a small town untouched by tourism. We were the only people on our trip staying here, and it made for a real 'off the beaten track' experience. The hostel owners did not speak a word of English and our Spanish is still extremely basic, but we managed to get by. In the afternoon we had a guided hike around the area, which in parts looked very similar to Canada, taking in (more!) inca ruins, condor nests and the deserted hot springs. In the evening the hostel owners cooked us dinner and their ten year old daugher played waitress in the empty restaurant. Despite not having any choice in what food was served it was a roaring success. That night was one of the coldest we’ve experienced so far, it was even on a par with night two of the Inca trail.

The next day we visited Colca Canyon itself and were dropped off 15 minutes before the main lookout point of Cruz Del Condor (for condor spotting) to hike along a once more deserted track. Colca Canyon is one of the world's deepest canyons at 3191m deep, but doesn’t quite have the wow factor of the Grand Canyon. However the surrounding landscape is extremely pretty and well worth the trip. We were even amazed by the proximity of the condors and we thought we were all wildlifed out after the Galapagos!

After the trip we spent one more night in Arequipa before heading to Puno for a whistle stop tour of Lake Titicaca from the Peruvian side. Here we managed to cram in two trips. The first was to the floating reed islands on Lake Titicaca which turned out to be a fascinating trip, despite our reservations that it would be way too touristy. These islands are, as the name suggests, made entirely of reeds. The reeds are added to the top as they rot away at the bottom and you bounce as you walk along the surface - it´s a very bizzare sensation. The communities that live on these islands seem to exist by using the reeds for all manner of things, from building houses, boats and look-outs, to eating and drinking the reeds and of course making souvenirs for the tourists.

Our second trip was to Sillustani, where pre-inca tribes buried their nobility in massive funeral chimneys. The surrounding area here looked very much like Scotland, with the chimney ruins looking remarkably like castle turrets from a distance. This afternoon trip was great fun, especially considering we had intended to give this site a miss. From here we returned to Puno for our final night in Peru before making our way acroos the border to Copacabana, Bolivia.

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Photos

Tasty Reed?
Paul sampling the local cusine on the Floating Reed Islands.