Arequipa and the Colca Canyon. Sabado 27 de octubre
–jueves 1 de noviembre.
I get
to the bus station in Cusco at 7:30 AM by taxi ($1), and travel all day toward Arequipa, with 10
stops. We cross the altiplano and get to well to around 4500 m. During this
portion of the journey (late afternoon ) it begins to snow, a wet snow, and the
front windshield of the upper part of the bus where I am sitting is on and off
covered with snow. It is high enough that I feel like I cannot get enough air.
Arrive in Arequipa and find a hostal, eat a quick meal in the street and then
relax. Arequipa: S16o 24’ W 71o 32’ Elev: 2395 m.
It is Sunday morning. Fine somewhere to grab some breakfast, which is
hard as nothing opens early on Sunday, and find a little restaurant opening at
9. Among other things, I order some fresh juice: for some reason, fresh juice
is always served warm. Is it because they are boiling the water used to mix
with the juice in a blender? Probably.
Then I head to the main square. Here there is an army march in progress.
In a lot of main plazas in Peru there is a daily military march, a changing of
the guard. There is also a small group with a tent in the square, and a big
banner denouncing police corruption with some newspaper articles about the
arrest of some police. Later in December, in Cochabamba, there is a big scandal
about crown prosecutors involved in an extortion ring. There I also see some
graffiti which says: ‘Si no habia policia, no seria delito’ (If there were no
police there would be no crime). The sentiment is widespread.
In the square there is also a group of teachers protesting teacher
salaries. Canadian teachers are pretty lucky in this respect. There is also a band playing. Pretty busy.
I visit the cathedral in the main square with its seventeenth century
elegant white façade. Inside it is huge and relatively simple which I
appreciate. The organ, imported from Begium, is one of the biggest on the
continent. There is a devil supporting the carved wooden pulpit.
I also visit the Museo Santuarios Andinos. This is a remarkable place.
Here we (everyone must be with a tour guide) watch a 20 min National Geographic
film about the finding of the museums most important collection: the remains of
four teenagers sacrificed to the apu’s, the mountain gods 500 years ago and
preserved by the frozen mountain top of Ampato, a 6300-m peak. A team of
archeologists climbed the mountain in search of such remains when a nearby
volcano erupted in 2000and melted the glacier on the mountain. What they found
was one young girl on the summit, and three more slightly lower down: 2 girls and
a boy. The girl from the summit, nick-named Juanita, is almost perfectly
preserved because she was so well-covered up. Archeologists believe it was a
great honour at the time to be chosen for sacrifice and everyone believed that
the person sacrificed would be going to join the gods. Juanita is on display in
an environmentally controlled glass chamber, as are many of the things found
with her, and other textiles, as well as copper, silver and gold offerings also
found. The amazing part too is that these ancient expeditions were able to
climb up there on a glacier with very little in the way of equipment. It could
not have been easy. It looks like too that they must have brought a significant
quantity of straw, to give them something to sit and camp on.
Lastly I visit the Monasterio de la Recoleta, on the other side of the
Rio Chili which rages through town, a monastery with some ancient monk’s rooms
on display which gives an idea of how they lived: extremely simple for the
lower ranking ones, and much more elaborate for the senior monks. There is also
an Amazonian section with photographs, stuffed animals and animal skins from
the Amazon, as well as dugout canoes and bows and arrows, as well as jungle
jewellery, all from at least 50 years ago. The most impressive to me were the skins on the wall of a 4 m caiman and an
8 m anaconda.
150 km northwest of Arequipa, is the Colca Canyon, a dry and very deep valley of the River
Majes, which is billed as the world’s deepest canyon. In reality, this is
mostly hype. It is not as sheer walled as the Grand Canyon, and is mostly about
1000-1200 m deep while the Grand Canyon
averages 1600 m deep, although apparently there is a point much further up the
valley where peak to valley floor is deeper than the Grand Canyon’s deepest. It
is nevertheless very beautiful and dramatic scenery, and on both sides, to the
north and the south, there are high snow-covered peaks. One of the ones to the
south is Ampato (6318 m), the volcano where Juanita and the other sacrificed
bodies were discovered. The mountain is again covered by a glacier. There are a
number of relatively flat areas on the slopes where there are villages which
live off agriculture, and have many terraced slopes and irrigation canals, and
who make extensive use of the trails to get produce out and goods in both on
foot and by mule. They grow a lot of avocado and mango for sale. The mountain
slopes are made up mostly of lava flows, with classic columnar jointing: the
hexagonal vertical columns typical of the formation caused by cooling of
basaltic lavas. These lava flows make for very steep and impressive cliffs and
I have the impression that these are not that old (in geological term). New economic opportunities have arisen with
the rise of the tourist traffic: small thatched roof stores along the trails
and camping areas.
I come here with a group ($120
all inclusive). We meet at 3:30 AM and
travel in a van with 15 people or so (some in different groups and going on
different hikes, but we are all headed for a lookout at a spot where the canyon
is about 1200 m deep and where a fairly large group of condors live. This is
the time of day when the condors are seen most frequently soaring, which is why
we left so early. Andean condors are actually too darn big in spite of their
3.5 m wingspan to fly without the help of thermals. They are the heaviest flying
bird in the Americas at 15 kg. Unfortunately most of the adults have gone to
the coast where seals are birthing and they feed on seal afterbirths, or so I
have been told. We do see one juvenile who is soaring along the cliff back and
forth and then lands on a rock only 30 m from where I am watching and hangs out
there with the wind whipping through its feathers.
A juvenile Andean condor lands near me on a rock which has split away
from the cliff.
We hike for three days, in very beautiful country, staying the first
night in a small village and the second night at a resort in a flat area at a
bend in the river where there are 6 companies sharing a large space with basic
restaurants, many thatched huts for people to stay, as well as swimming pools,
and a volleyball court. The first two days are not very taxing and we do not
travel that far, other than to scramble down from the valley wall to the river
bottom, over a bridge and up and along the far side. The third day is a steep
early morning climb (1100 m up) out of the valley: we leave without breakfast
at 5:30. I am the first one to the top at about 7:20 where I wait for the rest
of my group while 30 or so other people pass by. Our guide, Angel, tells me his record for the
climb is 1:15, which is a blistering pace.
On the second day, I go for an early walk and watch a group of
hummingbirds work a clump of small trees that are in flower. During our hike
that day, we pass one of many steep drop-offs and I listen to two of the guides talking about a
recent tourist death at that spot. Apparently, the previous week an Italian
dropped his water bottle and went down a steep slope of loose rock to retrieve
it. He slipped and fell off a 600 m cliff. The group had to wait two days for
the police to come and examine the body. A few months earlier, a woman was
traveling on a mule and the mule slipped and fell over. They both slid down
toward a cliff, but the mule was able to stop himself, the woman was not.
On the valley wall, there is a 150 m section of this cliff displaying
columnar jointing, the fracturing characteristic of cooling basaltic lava
flows.
Angel also shows us large colonies of mealy bugs on prickly pear cactus.
Mealy bugs are a relative of aphids that secrete wax to cover, camouflage and
protect themselves from dehydration. These bugs, when squished, are an intense
red, and apparently the village folk harvest them, process them into a dye and
make a significant amount of money from the sales. At another place, he points
out a shrub, leafless at this time of year, which when damaged, exudes a milky
sap. The sap burns the skin he says . Still, in my travels, I have yet to see
something which is as unpleasant as poison ivy to the touch.
Ancient Inca irrigation systems are all through this valley and are used
by local communities.
From an Israeli couple recently discharged from the Army, I learn the
current equivalent of ‘awesome’: Sibaba agozim (Cool nuts!!). I also learn a
lot about the army. I drink Pisco (a Peruvian brandy, made I am assuming around
the town of Pisco) and lemon with a noisy group from France. On the second
evening I teach the two Israelis and an English to play euchre.
We finish our hike in the village of Cabanaconde near the canyon lip,
where we eat breakfast and meet our van afterward. In the area around the
village there is a very large area of terraced slopes for agriculture.The van
again crowded with a lot of people including one really obnoxious woman from
Vancouver. We stop in a small town where there are craft stalls, the ‘second
prettiest church in the area’, and a few captive birds of prey, mostly for the
tourists to gawk at. This is illegal in Canada.
Inca terraces around the town of Cabanaconde
We make another stop for a hot springs and a restaurant in another
village. A third stop on the highest point in the altiplano (high plains) at
5100 m where the air is thin and I can really feel it. Here there are large
herds of alpaca and llamas grazing on public pastures. A little further on I
spot several small groups of vicunas, a smaller relative of llamas and alpacas, which are not
domesticated and whose numbers have dwindled except in some pretty remote
areas. In the past, their hair was spun and woven into very fine wool clothing
but there numbers are too small for this now.
Grazing domestic herds of sheep, llama, and alpaca on the altiplano. The
highest point the road crosses is 5100 m.
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