Colca Canyon, Peru

On February 19, 2015 by emily With 0 Comments - Uncategorized

We eat some awesome breakfast served by our hostel, of banana pancakes, caramel sauce and met our guide Angle. There are a total of 3 of us going on the tour from our hostel, a guy named Itzy, Mateo and I. We take a bus out to a small town, Cabanaconde, this is our starting point and also ending point. We will make a full loop of 26 kilometers and 3,500ft down into the canyon and back up. On the bus ride I started feeling sick, I have never had motion sickness, but I ended up throwing up on the bus ride there. My entire body is not up to par, we get lunch and shortly after it’s out onto the ground again. I decide to hike anyways, even with the rough start to the day, we were already there in town. We hiked down into the canyon about 4 hours and about 30 minutes up the other side int to the small village San Juan De Chuchow.

Sun Setting over the Colca Canyon, Racing day light.

The great canyon.

My knees were all shaky from the decline into the canyon. With the six hour bus ride, not really eating any thing all day and with the dusty trail, I felt so wasted. This small village mostly runs off solar power energy and just recently received power out to it but most houses are dark at night, power is too expencive, there are only about 25 residents. We stay in a hostel and eat dinner, the hostel is really a house with a couple extra guest rooms. I’m feeling really exhausted so I sleep imeadately it was the dirtyest dustyesy hike ever. My intestines were rocking the whole night so I didnt sleep well, I felt like death. The next morning we started the three hour hike, we left early at 6 am to catch the world cup game at 11.It amazing how even in the most remote places you can always have a cold beer and watch a live world cup game.

Dinner tonight.

On our way to the Oasis.

We made it right on time, I enjoyed a swim at half time. Then the rest of the groups of hikers started showing up, by the end of the evening there were about thirty hikers in the hostel. I was still pretty low on energy, and we slept early for our hike back up and out of the canyon. They called this place the Oasis. It surly was, there was a swimming pool, plenty of shade and beautiful separated rooms to sleep in. We departed at a grueling 4:30 am after some coca tea and bread. Although we were the first hikers to start up the mountain, we were passed by many groups. You could see the head lights the other hikers as they slowly caught up to us and passed by. It was probably one of the hardest hikes of my life, still recovering from stomach sickness and on the third day of hiking I had a rough time. Izty broke free from our group and kept on pushing on I had to take many breaks just to keep going. Finally we made it to the top and could see the view it was fantastic to watch the sun rise over the mountains and look back down into the canyon and know that we hiked that far.