Arequipa to Cusco

We had a day to enjoy Arequipa before getting a 12hour night bus to Cusco. It was a lovely city to ramble around, the central plaza was buzzing with people, including a group of school kids who spotted us sitting on a bench putting on suncream. We were obviously tourists or "Gringos" as the locals call us, their teacher brought them over to talk English to us and have take some pictures. It was pretty embarrassing stuff...

In the afternoon we went to a local museum where you could see and learn about an Incan girl who´d been sacraficed to the gods over 500 years ago atop a 5000 meter mountain. She´d been perfectly preserved in a frozen state and was discovered in the late 90`s and was now on display in the museum. I´m not usually a fan of museums in general but this was very interesting!

Now the journey to Cusco would usually be fairly ordinary, there are plenty of different bus companies to chose from with different prices and standards of buses. However, our trip was to be slightly out of the ordinary. A road block had been erected about 2 hours from Cusco and only 1 cheap bus company were still going - all others had cancelled their services. As we had to be in Cusco to start our Inca trail we had little choice but to put our trust in "Romaliza", the cheapest company there (the 12 hour trip cost about 8.50euro). 

The trip was going fine, the bus was actually fairly comfortable and I managed to grab some sleep, until we were awoken at 4:30am and were told we had to get off the bus. We grabbed our gear and had to walk for just under an hour in the dark past hundreds of trucks across a road block of rocks and burning tyres to reach another bus at the far side that was waiting for us. It was a memorable experience to say the least - I wished Id gotten some pics of it but I was wary of taking my camera out with all the angry protesters at the road block. We put the heads down and walked quickly through and were glad to reach the other side and to finally reach Cusco a few hours later.

Colca Canyon Ascent

We woke at 4am to the sound of Cocks crowing, we did our best to ignore them and got up for breakfast at 6:30 feeling fairly well refreshed. We set off treking along the base of the canyon, passing through several villages with spectacular views all the way.

 

3 hours later we arrived at "The Oasis" - a collection of hostels each with small swimming pools. We had some lunch here and lazed around in the pool for a while before starting off on the uphill climb out of the canyon.

We had heard differing stories about how long this takes, anywhere between 2 and 4 hours. We made good progress for the first 2 hours, but in the last quarter of the hike I ran completely out of energy. It was at this point I learned that Colca Canyon is in fact the deepest canyon in the word, deeper than the Grand Canyon! Combine that with a soaring midday sun and the high altitude and the result was possibly the most difficult physical challenge I´ve ever undertaken. We crawled our way upwards for another 2 hours, stopping every few minutes and eventually reached the top nearly 3.5 hours after we started.

We hit the road back to Arequipa and arrived back about 5 hours later after some interesting dirt roads and night time Peru driving.