Peru: Colca Valley, Colca Canyon

      Our hotel in Arequipa, Casa Arequipa (click HERE for website), helped us arrange an overnight visit to the Colca Valley and the Colca Canyon, a four- or five-hour drive from Arequipa. We were picked up by a guide in a van that eventually picked up seven other people for the trip.  On the way out of town, we made a stop at a small grocery where our guide instructed us to buy coca leaves to chew to fight altitude sickness. Later that day we'd be more than three miles above sea level.
     On the way to the Colca region we passed Ampato, the mountain where a few years ago the more-than-500-year-old frozen mummy of a girl, 11 to 15 years old when killed as a human sacrifice, was found near the top of its 6,290-meter peak. We saw the mummy itself in Arequipa, where it is exhibited in a museum devoted to the girl's story. She is known as Juanita, named for Johan Reinhard, one of the men who discovered her. We also passed through a wildlife preserve dedicated to restoring the mountains' population of vicuna, a camelid related to alpaca and llamas. Vicunas, whose wool is said to be the world's finest, are being brought back from the brink of extinction.

 Stands selling sweaters, shawls and other
handicrafts are scattered along the Colca road. 

     The Colca Canyon is a largely agricultural area; it supposedly has more Inca-era (and earlier) farming terraces than any other part of Peru. Its indigenous population, the Collagua and Cabana peoples, were conquered by the Inca Mayta Capac in the 1400s.  A century later the Spanish drove the Collagua and Cabana into new settlements to work in mines or on plantations, and largely forgot about them, never building roads or establishing ways to communicate with the remote settlements.
     It wasn't until the late 1970s that work began on a road connecting the Colca region with Arequipa and the rest of Peru.  The new road connects a series of previously isolated (and thus preserved) Spanish colonial villages, the "new settlements" that the people were forced into. Each has a church, some more elaborate than others, and a central square. In the countryside there are signs of the communities that were abandoned when the Spanish came in. We spent the night at the Colca Lodge and Spa, which has hot-spring baths on the side of the river, as well as a llama and alpaca farm and an excellent restaurant. The next morning our van and guide reappeared and we were on the road again.

It's hard to read in my photo, but the writing on 
 the side of this stone says that the elevation
here is 4,910 meters. That's 16,109 feet or just
a little over three miles. The view from here
is shown below.

  The road eventually leads into the mountains where the Colca River has created a canyon more than twice as deep as the Grand Canyon in the U.S.  The depth of the canyon -- at least 3,400 meters -- wasn't verified until 1979.         Although the area  is being promoted as an adventure destination, every tourist we saw was like us -- coming in by bus or van or car to see what we could see and then being driven out. No one was attempting the river's Class V rapids the day we were there.
     The road (narrow, gravel-covered and busy with tourist vans and large buses) took us to a viewing station overlooking canyon walls where Andean condors -- one of the world's largest fliying birds -- nest.  These vultures are so big that they become airborne by jumping off cliffs and looking for uplifting thermal currents that they can ride up. When they do flap their wings, it seems to be in slow motion.

This is the view from the mirador shown above.
The snow-capped mountains in the distance are
the central Andes; some are volcanos. You can
 see that we're well above the tree line.

Every few years these wild vicuna are rounded up
and shorn of their valuable wool. The government
maintains strict control of the animals and their
extremely desirable wool. 

Vicunas are slimmer and more graceful than
alpacas and llamas. They also produce less wool,
which is why they are not shorn annually like
most other wool-producing animals.

A handicrafts market is set up outside a church in one
of the Colca Valley's many Spanish Colonial towns. Until
the late 1970s, towns such as this were largely cut off
from the rest of Peru because there were no decent
roads in the region.  Below: A shrine in the church.
The triangular shape of the Virgin's dress echos
the shape of the area's mountains and conflates her
with Pachamama, the Andean earth goddess, one
of the ways in which the Catholic faith was made
palatable to the indigenous people.

Another scene from a Colca Valley village. Note the
 traditional dress of the woman on the right. We were
told that in the 1500s the indigenous women copied
the petticoats of the few women who came with the Spanish
conquerers but used their own deeply colored dyes to
create a unique style that's still seen today.

A woman herds llamas and alpacas in the highlands
of the Colca region. Llamas and alpacas are raised for both

their wool and their meat. I didn't taste llama, but I had 

alpaca tenderloin and burgers. To me it tastes like goat.

The Quecha word for dried llama meat is charqui, 
the source of the word "jerky," used in English usually
to mean dried beef.

The Colca Lodge and Spa as seen from the road
approaching it. Some of the terraces, which date
back hundreds of years, are still used for farming.
The small round pools on the far bank of the Colca
River are filled with water from nearby hot springs
and are a great place to soak. The flat-roofed
building at the bottom of the terraces houses a bar.
The pastures on this side of the river are used for
raising llamas and alpaca, which guests can visit.
 Click HERE for the lodge's website.

Waters from natural hot springs are channeled into
these pools along the Colca River at the Colca Lodge.

Most of the Colca Canyon lacks a well-defined rim 
with views of the river and the bottom of the canyon.

This trail offers great views.

This mirador or viewing station is the No.1 destination
on the Colca River. Set high above the canyon, it looks
down at condor nesting sites on the canyon walls. Morning
is the best time for spotting condors, so visitors by the
busload  have to get up very early -- most of the
 tourist accommodations are a couple of hours away.

I hope those binoculars provided this birder with a
better view of the condor perched on a rock than
 my camera gave me.