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Once again offexploring has failed us when it comes to a picture to match the blog. And bad news I'm afraid - we wont be uploading any photos of the amazing colca canyon as we realised when we arrived in Arequipa that we'd left our memory card reader (with the card in it) in the internet cafe in Cuzco! Very upsetting indeed when we were in such an amazingly photographic place.
So we got to Arequipa and booked ourselves a bus straight away to Cabanaconde. The bus wasn't for a few hours so we sat and had some food on the terrace at the bus station with a view of El Misti Volcano. Then we sat and played cards on a grass verge in the middle of the road outside the bus station. The bus station itself wasnt very nice so we attempted to sit on a pretty patch of grass in the car park but got moved on by a security guard. After a good few hours of choking on the fumes of passing coaches, it was finally time to board our bus (or it would have been if it hadn't arrived half an hour late). The journey was a long, bumpy and smelly 6 hours. It was dark when we arrived in tiny Cabanaconde (only a couple of thousand people live there). We were met off the bus and taken to our hostel. We had a basic dinner in the restaurant of another hostel where we met this Swedish guy called Johann. We got chatting and he said he was planning to go to Sangalle the next day, same as us, so we arranged to meet at 8 the next morning.
The next morning came and the 3 of us set off to walk down the side of the worlds second deepest canyon (more than twice as deep as the grand canyon).
TBC... (just realised we've got to go have dinner and get on our bus to Lima...)
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So we set off walking down the 5km path to the oasis of Sangalle at the bottom of the canyon. It was a looong and tiring walk. It was all down hill so you'd think it was easy but the path was so rocky that we spent the whole time looking at our feet for fear of breaking any ankles. about a third of the way down we could finally see the oasis, a beautiful tempting tropical green with swimming pools that were deceptively far away.
Eventually we made it, half an hour after Johann. We had a swim, played cards, had some lunch, sunbathed... just generally chilled and soaked up some sun. We had planned to walk back up but once we got down there we weren't sure if we could quite be bothered with the climb back up so we payed 50 soles and hired a couple of mules instead. It was pretty scary when we first got on them. Mine kept feeling like its knees were buckling which was pretty unnerving as we were on an even steeper, skinnier path then the one we'd walked on, with a big drop to the side. The mules were quite fat so when you looked over the side it looked like you were already off the edge and in order to take the sharp corners the mules would go right to the edge of the bends. After 20 mins or so we got used to it and it was quite fun. We got back up in under 2 hours instead of the 4 it would have taken us walking. We had dinner with Johann in the restaurant owned by our hostel - soup and alpaca steak with rice accompanied by a pisco sour to celebrate that i had finished my antibiotics. We all had an early night. Johann was leaving at 5 the next morning and we had to be up by 7.
The next day we got the 7.30 bus down the road to Cruz del Condo, just down the road. Its a view point over the canyon which is famous asbeing one of the best places to see andean condors (huge birds of prey) which were of great spiritual importance to the incas (and still are to many people) as messengers to the gods. We were really lucky to see quite a few. There was a family of four that were flying over us all morning, some times only a couple of metres above our heads. The biggest one had about a 2m wing span which is actually not that big for a condor they can be up to about 3.5m. There the largest flying land birds in the western hemisphere apparently. they looked pretty impressive.
We were due to stay in cabanaconde another night but being well aware that there wasnt much to do anjd with it still being before midday, we decided we would head back to arequipa that day. We started walking the three hour walk back to town but a bus showed u`p so we hopped on that. Another bumpy, smelly crowded 6 hour bus journey got us back to Arequipa where we stayed the night in a hostel near the bus station. We went for dinner in town in a mexican place called tequila y tacos and then had another fairly early night - we've just got into a weird sleeping pattern from Machu Picchu and stuff. The next day we wandered around Arequipa a bit. We bought a new memory card for our camera! Did a spot of window shopping and had some tasty peruvian style hamburgers. The main highlight of the day, the one thing we'd planned to do in Arequipa, was a visit to one of the city's most well known museums which houses Juanita, the Ampato ice maiden. She's an inca ice mummy found on the summit of the nearby Ampato volcano. They actually found a whole collection of them. They were child sacrifices between the ages of about 6 and 14. The incas saw the mountains as gods and when the gods got angry there were huge disasters (errupting volcanos). The way to appease the gods was to make a sacrifice. It was a great honour to be chosen. They were chosen at birth from all over the empire and sent to be schooled in cuzco. Only the purest, cleverest, most beautiful were chosen to be sent to live with th gods.
Juanita was found in 1995 when a neighbouring volcano errupted and melted some of the ice on top of ampato and exposed Juanita who had been buried there for over 500 years. She was perfectly preserved because of the ice. They showed us a national geographic documentary about her discovery by an anthropologist from the US and his peruvian climbing partner. Then a guide took us round and showed us all the artifacts that they had foung with Juanita and with the other inca children found in the mountains. Juanita is the best preserved by far. Finally he showed us Juanita herself, Kept in a glass box at -19 degrees. It was really eerie. Shes tiny. Her skin and her hair still looks so fresh, just a bit frozen. It was very strange indeed.
Our nice comfy cama bus to Lima left at 9.30pm, 15 hours later we finally arrived...
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