April 19 – Arequipa
Well we did it. We stuffed our faces with an 11 course meal, staggered home under the weight of a several hundred Soles worth of wine, an “slept” for about three and a hald hours, getting up at 3:45 to head once again to the airport – this time for our flight to Arequipa. This is the start of the Andes half of our vacation.
To resolve my persistent GI issues, I caved and took a powerful antibiotic at the risk of some unnerving sounding potential side effects. All was good in less than a day so … worth it? I was excited to start Part II of our trip healthy, but then woke up with a cold, making me desperately in need of Tylenol cold & sinus meds. Vanessa helped me find something called Tapsin, basically Peruvian NeoCitran but much less disgusting.
Our reason for coming to Arequipa is two-fold: 1) tomorrow we make our way to Chivay which is our home base for going to see the Andean Condors, and 2) we are acclimatizing for a hike to Rainbow Mountain in a few days which will take us up to 5,000* metres. Arequipa sits at 2,335* metres and Chivay at 3,635*, neither particularly alarming, although in retrospect Chivay is a bit high. We have some altitude drugs from the travel clinic and per the instructions, we are to start taking them one day before our maximum elevation. Rainbow Mountain is on April the 23rd, so we planned to start our drugs on the 22nd. In hindsight, we should have started today, as will be revealed.
We had pre-booked an afternoon city tour of Arequipa, including a Jesuit monastery which had sustained significant damage during some of the massive earthquakes that can affect these parts of the Andes (something I’m glad I wasn’t aware of until just this moment). Rebuilding is still underway in many old buildings, particularly the churches. Our guide took us to see a painting of the last supper which would appear again throughout our trip. It’s interesting in that in an effort to “convert” the native population to Christianity, this last supper painting was adapted to show the apostles enjoying a meal of local Peruvian cuisine such as guinea pig, corn, and potatoes. This way, Christian customs would seem familiar and normal to the natives. Well played, missionaries.
At Mundo Alpaca, we learned about the evolution of the South American Camelids into the 4 major families that still live in Peru – the llama, alpaca, vicuña, and guanaco. Alpaca and llama have been domesticated, but vicuña and guanaco are wild. All four camelids roam freely throughout the Andes, as we would see throughout the countryside, but alpaca and llama seem to return on their own to their home farms each night.
We made one stop at a little shop in the central square for something called Queso Helado, which translates to “frozen cheese” but in fact has no cheese ingredient, only milk, egg, cinnamon, vanilla, coconut, and honey. It is delicious, and if you can find a recipe I highly recommend it! I also wrote down something about chicha de jora, which is a corn beer, but don’t actually remember if I tried it. In my defence, I was extremely tired and suffering from altitude and a head cold!
April 20 – Chivay
Our ultimate destination is Chivay, gateway to Colca Canyon, home of the condors. It’s a 3 hour drive, without stops, through the mountains and so we piled into the tour van at the more reasonable time of 7:00 am to beat the worst of rush hour traffic. Not entirely clear on today’s plan but part of it is driving up over a much higher elevation.
Arequipa is a big city, I believe 1.2 million, and it took us an hour just to leave the city limits. The city roads are strewn with speed bumps, and apparently the strategy for navigating the streets is to accelerate rapidly up to a speed bump, hit the brakes, bounce over, and speed onto the next one. It’s anybody’s guess who will be the first to answer the call of Gravol.
Here is as good place as any to revisit my miscalculation regarding the altitude meds. We are a few days away from our hike at 5,000 m, so the plan is/was to start the altitude drugs the day before the hike, on April 22. However … we will spend today driving over the mountains at altitudes ranging from 2,300 m (pretty much ok) to 4,900 m (absolutely not ok). Due to this miscalculation, I will spend the day feeling very unwell.
There is a lovely old bridge, part of the main road, which was built in 1555 and we stopped to take a look. We had a nice view of Misty Volcano, and some very beautiful countryside along the way.
We spotted some wild vicuñas so stopped for a looksee. We are currently at 4000m. (Ultimately we saw all 4 of the local camelids roaming the countryside.)
Interesting tidbit about the vicuña. The locals sheer alpaca for wool, as you probably know, but they will also shear the vicuña. As near as I could figure, they have some way of herding the wild vicuña into a pen where they are sheared and released. Vicuña wool is much more fine than alpaca, and is more rare, making it one of the most expensive textiles in the world. If you’d like to buy a nice high quality alpaca shawl, perhaps you’ll pay $200-300, but the same shawl made with vicuña will would likely run you around $4,000.
About halfway to Chivay, we stopped at a little roadside cafe pitstop with a nice view of the misty volcano, and paid 1 Sol for toilet paper to use the loo. I was a bit confused as to what was going on i the cafe so Vanessa ordered me some kind of tea concoction made from Coca and Muna leaves. Very soothing. FYI Coca leaves are recommended as a remedy for altitude sickness. Yes, these are the same leaves used to make cocaine. I drank a lot of it!
We browsed through a cute little market beside the cafe and most of us bought something to combat the colder climate – hats, scarves, gloves. We also picked up some snacks of chips and candy for the rest of the drive. The cafe sits at 4700 m and it’s getting really difficult to, you know, breath. I’m lightheaded and I would appreciate a bathroom that doesn’t charge 1 Sol for 6 squares of toilet paper.
We continued to stop at several lookout spots, and as mentioned the landscape is just beautiful! After finally reaching our highest point (4,900 m) we drove literally down the side of the mountain into Chivay. It’s worth seeing the route on google maps …
Our hotel in Chivay, Colca Lodge, is a resort with hot springs, a spa, and a suspension bridge across a river which you can use to visit an alpaca farm. The lodge is thankfully back down at 3336 m and even that was a struggle to walk back up the stairs from the hot springs which are (“in a van”) down by the river. It is suggested to drink a lot of water to help with altitude but that’s not a great plan when you’ve got a 4 hour van ride that only makes 2 stops at bathrooms (toilet paper 1 Sol). Instead, I had a much needed hour-long nap, drank more Coca tea, and then soaked in the hot springs. I accidentally left my phone in someone else’s bag thinking it was Vanessa’s, but just as we were starting to panic a lovely gentleman returned it.
Checked off a few more birds – giant hummingbird (!!!), Andean goose, Andean Gull, giant coot, crested duck, puma ibis, lesser yellowlegs
April 21 – Cruz Del Condor
This is it! Day of the Condor! Colca Canyon is about 34 k from our hotel, if I read the maps right (which is 50-50) so once again we were able to leave at a more sensible hour – still early, as we were aiming to be at the canyon by around 9:00-ish. On our way, we stopped in Yanque, primarily to walk down a footpath and take in the most spectacular views!! I apologize for how many pictures of this I am posting. We are above a valley that stretches on either side of our path, stunning green fields, terraces, farms, and a river. After soaking in the view, we made a quick stop in the market square to look around and to tour an old church built around 1400. By this point I was eager to get to the condors, and I didn’t have much interest in the church apart from leaving it.
Finally en route to the canyon, the day was shaping up to be extremely foggy which didn’t bode well. However, another guest from the lodge had told us that yesterday had been foggy when they arrived at the canyon and by around 10:30 a bunch of them wanted to bail, but this guest wanted to stay. So the tour guide drove the others to the nearest bathroom and by the time they got back it had cleared and they saw about 8 or 10 condors. I had filed this tidbit away for emergency use.
Colca Canyon is about 3,300 m above sea level, and has a depth of 1,000-2,000 m, one of the deepest canyons in the world. And it is, of course, home to the Andean Condor, one of the largest flying birds in the world, with a wingspan of almost 11 feet!
When we arrived, the canyon was shrouded in full-on fog, as feared. It was about 9:30 so if 11:00 was the magic hour we only had an hour an a half to wait. Our tour guide was not optimistic and said things like “we wait a bit more and then we go” but Paul stepped in and said no, we are all good to wait until we see a condor. At around 10:00 our guide drove us to the main viewing point (we had stopped at a less popular viewpoint, he was very good about keeping us away from the bulk of the tourists). It was still foggy but it definitely seemed like it might be slowly thinning. After less than half an hour, someone shouted Condor!! (It wasn’t me, I swear it!) A massive bird drifted up out of the canyon and flew right past us maybe 30-40 feet away. Amaaaaaazing!!! Ultimately we saw over a dozen, including a juvenile! So my day is complete.
I didn’t know it at the time, but everyone took photos of me looking at the Condors, which I found very sweet!
We hiked along the cliffside back to our starting point, a long hike and very lovely. We saw several more condors although most of these were further away. The hike was hopefully good training for rainbow mountain.
We had lunch in Yanque and got back to the resort with about 15 mins to spare before various spa appointments. We kept dinner low key by ordering room service for the 6 of us which we ate together in the cottage Jeff and I are sharing with Jen and Cameron.
Afterthought: I wanted to drop in a map of the areas we visited during this phase of the trip. For context, or just because you like maps.
Tomorrow: Transfer to Cusco.
*5,000 m = 16,404 ft
*2,335 m = 7,661 ft
*3,645 m = 11,926 feet and is officially higher than I’ve ever been before