Colca Canyon, Peru

We splashed out here to take a "private driver with a 4x4" from Arequipa to the Colca Canyon. Turned out the driver was only interested in driving us there as quickly as possible, and returning us to Arequipa as fast as possible the next day. The flowery script in Rickshaw Travel's online brochure was far from the truth of what we actually got. In addition the hotel where we stayed, the Refugio, was appalling - clapped out, not maintained and run by a few teenagers with no management in sight.

Colca Canyon is not that far from Arequipa. When he was in a hurry to return to his family on the return trip, our driver managed Chivay to Arequipa in two and a half hours. Then it is another hour or so to the place where you view the condors a little way up the canyon valley.

The route climbs from the city of Arequipa's altitude of 2300m, up across the Salina y Aguada Blanca nature reserve. Eventually the road reaches an altitude of 4800m, before dropping down to the Colca valley at 3500m. The Colca Valley is over 100km long and is claimed to be deeper than the Grand Canyon - though you certainly do not get that impression.

Click on the thumbnails below to get larger photos

Blue jeep is our transport	Vicuna on the alto-plano	Across a high desert	And drop down to Chivay

The Refugio Hotel is 8 km outside Chivay. It could have been a good hotel, but is now a tip. We were dropped here by our surly driver at 12.30 and there is effectively no way into the town of Chivay, so you are marooned here. This would be fine if the hotel were fine, but it was not

• There is a stack of steps to get down to get to reception. You have to haul your bags up and down these steps
• They have never finished the gardens and they are now overgrown with weeds
• The outdoor hot pool was empty when we were there, and even it had been full was unusable as it was surrounded by builders' rubble
• The towels in our room were still damp, and when we asked for dry towels it took nearly an hour for them to produce dry towels - and even then they were still damp.
• The restaurant area was too cold to eat in comfortably
• You are 8 km out of town and it is impossible to get anywhere other than the hotel grounds
• Maintenance is so bad that the door had swollen and it was not possible for a woman to open it from the inside. My wife failed, I opened it, and invited the receptionist into the room and asked her to get out - she failed to open the door as well.
• This is not a 4 star hotel. With all our problems the manager stayed well out of sight, and let pleasant junior staff deal with us.

Do not stay here, the place is a building site, there is no maintenance, and no management to be seen

Click on the thumbnails below to get larger photos

The Refugio Hotel claims 4 stars, and was built about 3 years ago. It has a scenic position in the river Colca
We found this collection of llamas in the grounds, including a very young baby			The indoor hot spring
The room was cold, as it only had a small heater	The grounds had ceased to be maintained -their main terrace	The larger hot pool was nearly empty and surrounded by debris

Colca Canyon is about 100 miles northwest of Arequipa. It claims to be is more than twice as deep as the Grand Canyon , and it is promoted as the "world's deepest canyon,". The canyon certainly does not give the impression of anything like the depth of the Grand Canyon. The local people still maintain ancestral traditions and continue to cultivate the pre-Inca stepped terraces.

Parts of the canyon are habitable, and Inca and pre-Inca terraces are still cultivated along the less precipitous canyon walls. The small town of Chivay is on the upper Colca River. Here the canyon is less deep and there is space for a lot of cultivation.The canyon deepens as the river flows downwards and there is a series of small villages in the 35 miles between Chivay and the village of Cabanaconde.

Click on the thumbnails below to get larger photos

The canyon is a series of these small Andean villages interspersed with glorious views over the river and the terraces
Every so often there would be a layby on the road, and it would be full of souvenirs. The same ladies then moved on to the next layby
Each village had its very traditionally designed church. The cross was on the hillside above Chivay. There was a local market there.
Chivay was not really a tourist town, and the ladies in local costume were wearing it because that was what they wore.

The canyon is best known as the home to the Andean Condor (Vultur gryphus). Between 8 and 10am the condors can be seen at close range as they soar on the early morning thermals. 'Cruz del Condor' has been constructed for tourists to get the best view of the birds. We saw a dozen or so birds soaring in groups between 8.30 and 9.30, and by 10am both the condors and the tourists had disappeared.

Click on the thumbnails below to get larger photos

The name of the game here is to see condors, then photograph them. I succeeded in seeing them, but the close ups are not mine !
The Cruz del Condor is a special viewing area, and by chance we bumped into our (by now) old friends Sue and Pat

The surly driver had us back in our hotel at 2.30, rather than the between 6 and 7 that the brochure promised. He seemed surprised that we were less than happy with his tour. My complaints by phone had not helped our position in the Refugio, nobody had the power to move us on a Saturday, they were all at home enjoying their weekend. However we were pursued by phone calls in Puno and in Cusco from less than convivial men about our complaints - I never did find out who they were, and in the end I told them to stop bugging me, I just wanted to forget the problems encountered in the Colca Canyon trip.

Arequipa

Our trip to Peru