Colca Canyon

Colca Canyon is located in southern Peru 100 miles north of Arequipa. It the 2nd deepest canyons in western hemisphere at 3400 meters (11333ft). The largest is its neighbor canyon called Cotahuasi at 3501m. They say Colca is twice as deep as the Grand Canyon, but we didn't think so. We think they count it from the tip of the surrounding mountains. The walls are not sheer, which makes it appear less impressive. We planned to hike to the oasis at the bottom, which is only a two hour hike, but by the time we found the trail head we realized we were a little too weak from being sick for this exercise.
So I didn't take any pictures of the city of Arequipa, but it was quite nice. It is the second largest city in Peru, and it has a couple of volcanos that make up the surrounding landscape. The centro was really nice, and we got to go to a really great museum. They have an Inca mummy there that is over 500 years old. Her name is Juanita, and she was a 12 year old princess. She traveled with some of the most important people in the Inca culture for three months going south from the Inca capital Cuzco to a volcano close to Arequipa. Volcanos are gods to Incas, so they picked this purposefully because the neighboring volcano was erupting and they wanted to make a sacfrice to the gods to make them happy. So they took three children to the volcano, had a ceremony, got them drunk, killed them, and buried them in three holes on top of the dormant volcano. It was so cold that Juanita froze within days. She stayed frozen for centuries until 1995 when an erupting volcano made the ice start to melt around her grave and she fell out and toppled down the hill some 100 meters. 15 days after she fell from her grave she was found by a hiker. In those 15 days the sun dried out her face since it was the only part that was exposed, but the rest of her is perfectly preserved. We seen a magnified picture of her hand and it looks real with wrinkles in the skin and everything. I was not aware of this, but when we die our fat starts oozing out of our pores. She froze so soon after her death that it froze the fat that was starting to ooze from her pores in her fingers. It was all quite amazing. The museum also had perfectly preserved clothing and offerings that the Incas left in the children's graves.

The view approaching the edge of the canyon. As you can we are already half way down the depth of the canyon, as they measure it, before we even get to the edge of the canyon.

Nick with his happy face on while we are trying to find the trail head.

How Nick really feels while we are scrambling through people's fields trying to figure out the trails.

An Andean Condor!

Another Andean Condor flying right by us. They have a wing span of over 10 feet!!

Looking down into the canyon. You can see the oasis and the river at the very bottom.

Another picture looking down into the canyon the other way.

A close up picture of the oasis at the bottom. They have several hostels where you can spend the night at the bottom of the canyon.

A bridge.

A mother and her daughter wearing traditional clothes. They were selling crafts at a lookout point.

The start of the canyon on the eastern side.

I took this picture while waiting at the bus station. In South America guys attach their bicycles to carts to make it easier to tranport stuff.