Colca Canyon

Canyon de Colca is deep and wide and big and huge, similar in depth to our Grand Canyon, but with very different topography... and we hiked down into it with our backpacks!  What a knee killer!  Took us 7 hours and began to sprinkle by the time we got down to the bottom where we were advised to stay in the OASIS by the Lonely Planet guide book.  We had become so anxious to reach the bottom, where we had been seeing the piscinas (swimming pools) for the last several hours!  Once there, we had a look at the palapa where we would stay and it was BASIC!  Double bed (made up with linens, so we did not carry our sleeping bags and pads, gratefully!) and a table to put some things on... otherwise, dirt floor (with mud already forming where the water was running in!), bamboo walls and a thatch roof (with plastic reinforcement to keep the water from entering from above!).  Dinner to be served in a separate building in several hours.   Up to the ¨bar¨ (outside with a very leaky thatch roof overhead and no walls around it!) where lots of foreign languages were being spoken.  A few brave souls did jump into the pool, but we were not two of them!  It was rainy and chilly!  Dinner left a great deal to be desired!  The room was full of folks and it had the feel of an expedition in there, for sure... roughing it!  The outhouse - toilet was a couple of inches deep in water.... makes one wonder about that water! 

High points on the way down into the Canyon were the Condor who flew past barely inches below us, the snake who surprised Tom just under a step that he was stepping down and a cool lizard, not to mention the incredible views and blossoming flowers! 

Left fairly early the following morning in order to get ourselves out and to a bus to take us to Arequipa.  We managed to get ourselves just a tad lost and ended up climbing a rock wall, skirting corn fields, until we found our way to a road that brought us right to our Hostel.... PACHAMAMA!  Nice Hostel  with a nice name (!) run by a guitar playing, very cool young man!  Great food!  Fun atmosphere!  Highly recommended in Cabanaconde! 

The not so happy ending to the story is that we no sooner made it back to Arequipa than Tom found himself spending a great deal of time sitting on the porceline throne.... and I followed a couple of days later!  Argh!  That food down in the Canyon was NOT highly recommended... the high recommendation is to stay somewhere besides OASIS!