Arequipa & Cañon del Colca

We had a great weekend about 10 hours south of Cuzco in Arequipa! Arequipa is known as the white city, because the colonial buildings are all made of the white volcanic sillar rock. It was beautiful in the plaza at sunset with the cathedral lit up! We spent a day in the city, and the next day we went on a tour of the Colca Canyon, which was breathtaking and cannot be shown for all its glory in photos.

Arequipa at sunset...

The Colcan Canyon is actually the deepest canyon in the world--it beats the Grand Canyon! We left for the tour at 3 in the morning, knowing that it would take us about a 3 hours drive in the high Andean plateau to get us to the canyon. We all fell asleep, and woke up at 5 in the morning to snow! We were totally not expecting this and it was so awesome! We were at the high point of about 5,000 meters above sea level called Pata Pampa. You could see a pretty good view of the volcanoes in the distance, and just a lot of flat land covered in snow!

Then we were on our way to the village of Chivay. On our way, we learned a lot of interesting things about the ancient indigenous cultures of this region before the Incas. One big difference between these indigenous cultures and the Incas is they believed the mountains were gods, not the sun. They would even purposefully shape their heads to be flat at the top, or pointy at the top to resemble their gods, the mountains, since they believed they descended from them. The only way they could do this was to start shaping their heads as infants! Nowadays since Incan influence, they wear hats to represent the mountains the same way, just not as extreme. We also learned about the food that they would cultivate and prepare, like different kinds of potatoes, quinoa, corn, and wheat. The meat they would eat was alpaca or cuy (guinea pig) meat. These villages nowadays thrive mostly on tourism, but farming is still very important!

We ate breakfast in the village, and took some photos of the beautiful view. A little girl was "photobombing" our pictures so that she could get tips with her traditional outfit and her baby lamb. We found out afterwards back in the van that the little girl was actually a boy! In the past, boys would have to dress up as girls in order to sneak in as a suitable match for an important young lady. Sneaky sneaky!

After breakfast, we stopped a couple more times to take in the beautiful scenery, and then we arrived at el Cañon del Colca! It was amazing! We also saw some huge condor birds perched; unfortunately they weren't interested in flying for us! After the Canyon, we headed to some hot springs, but we decided to eat our lunch instead since we weren't prepared to swim. On our way back to Arequipa, we learned about the difference between llamas and Alpacas (llamas are much taller), and stopped by to see a ton of them grazing on the land! Mike tried to get close to them, but they weren't interested in a photo shoot!

El Cañon del Colca...Check out the video below too!

The condors!

Mike and the Canyon!

Alpaca bums...