After my awesome Galapagos trip I was finding it hard to say goodbye and was starting to think that the rest of the holiday might be disappointing compared to the first week...
...boy was I wrong! The second part of the trip was to travel down to Peru and venture into the Colca Canyon but to get there we had to take a minibus through the Atacama desert-the driest desert in the world! The landscape was stunning and so alien that I felt as if I was on the moon. On the way we stopped off at some points of interest such as carvings in rocks, called petroglyphs, that were created by the Incas to document their way of life. In addition, there was a place called Jurassic Park where there were fossilised dinosaur footprints in the sand! Eventually it got quite late and we ended up driving in the dark. This meant I got to see the best night sky I had ever seen. The stars were the brightest things you could see for miles and miles-apart from the bus' headlights of course.
The next day was our first day in the canyon, which happens to be the deepest canyon in the world! It started with a 7km trek down from 3350 metres to the canyon's bottom and then a 13km trek to the oasis we were staying in. The mountains we were walking beside towered above us and made the paths that were cut into them look extremely precarious. The locals were really friendly and accommodating to tourists despite having such a hard and isolated life in the canyon. Even a dog from a nearby village followed us to our destination for 12km. When we finally got to the oasis, we were absolutely shattered and went for a swim in a pool fed by glacial melt water then collapsed into bed to prepare for the final day.
It was an early start, 4:45 in fact, when we began our ascent from 2250 metres to 3350 metres. The reason we had to get up so early was to avoid the blazing sun that rose at about 6:00. However, this meant for the first hour we had to stick together and wear head torches to see where we were going. After the sun had risen, I shot off by myself and started to enjoy the challenge of the climb and took in the scenery. Towards the end I began to really feel the altitude and wondered how much farther I had to go when...I arrived. I was completely elated and got a massive kick out of finishing and the view from the top was brilliant. Unfortunately, I had to wait an hour and a quarter until the rest of my family arrived and when they finally did meet me at the top we stopped in a hot spring to relax our aching muscles.
That was the end of Colca Canyon but as we trundled along to Puno on the bus I knew Machu Picchu was only around the corner.