After two nights in Arequipa, hanging out with some travelling artisans and jugglers, exploring the colonial streets and white, stone churches, we boarded a bus for a small town called Chivay. We decided to hole up there for the night and take an early bus to a place where condors were commonly seen leaving their habitat to hunt. The alarm went off at 4:15 a.m. so we could catch the 5 o´clock bus to make it to the Cruz de Condores before their 9 a.m. wake-up call. I didn´t know that Lebn was capable of getting out of bed before noon, but he functioned surprisingly well at that early hour. I don´t think it was the excitement of seeing condors so much as his excitement for seeing a great big canyon and a river, two of his favorite things. But we made it to the bus for standing room only and were at the condor viewing platform 2 hours later.
The canyon was beautiful in the morning light, but we had a very cold 2 more hours to wait before the condors started to make their appearance. And just before they did, the hoards of tourist buses began to make theirs. It´s always a bit startling to us when we´re suddenly surrounded by English. A large part of it is that we really take a lot of pride in learning Spanish and enjoy immersing ourselves in it and using it whenever we can. But we also like to be able to talk about people in English and not have them understand. Does that make us bad people? The great irony is that we find that the English speaking tourists are the ones we want to talk about the most. Sometimes they say the silliest things. And I´d forgotten how much harder it is to tune English out. With Spanish it´s easy, I have to focus to understand Spanish. But with English, especially not being around it very much anymore, its like I suddenly have super-hearing and even the slightest whisper is deafening.
After a few condors showed up and we´d felt we´d got our money´s worth, we had to split. I had to split. I wanted nature and peaceful quiet. Our next stop was a smaller town called Cabanaconde, a 2-hour walk down a dirt road. But it´s the same road the buses use, so we quickly looked for another option before we suffocated on exhaust and dirt. We hopped a stone fence to follow an aqueduct we saw below, but when that trail ended, we ended up in rural Peru. We were in the fields, following trails that mysteriously petered out, tromping through thistles and burrs, up and down, back and forth. It was all very lovely with views of snow-covered peaks and the richly colored canyon, but not exactly a short-cut or leisurely stroll. However, we eventually found an established trail and made it to Cabanaconde by lunchtime. We grabbed a quick bite, then headed toward the canyon.
Our directions were vague, but we´ve never let that stop us before. As we were approaching the canyons edge though, an old man started yelling at us from a hill on the other side of a ravine. We could barely understand him, but got the impression that we were going the wrong way, so through a serious of shouts and hand gestures, we managed to climb around the ravine and up to where he was. He told us there was nothing where we were going and he lead us to the main trail, scrambling over rock walls and muddy cliffs like no old man I know. When we got to the main trail, we thanked him and began our descent.
It was steep, covered in loose rocks and very slippery, but the views were amazing. The rock walls of the canyon were an impossible array of colors, and when the richly green and snaking river came into view, the intense pain that we were starting to feel in our calves, eased up a little. Only a little. Once, we got a little closer to the bottom, our destination became visible, a lush oasis hidden beneath the surrounding desert. There were palm trees and a countless variety of fruit trees that made us slightly disappointed that it was the wrong time of year for fruit. But with the cabanas made of bamboo, and the swimming pools fed by natural springs, it looked like paradise to us. Most people just hike down for a day with a little water and a change of clothes, stay in a cabana, then walk back out. But we had all our gear, lots of food, and the intention to camp. We stayed there for four days, reading, writing, juggling, and exploring the canyon and river on a number of day hikes. It was fantastic.
The place we stayed at had two different areas and it took us awhile to figure out the difference, but it seemed like the kids were down at the bottom, the grown-ups up top. We were classified as kids, which was fine with us, and set up our tent in a big grassy field frequently grazed by alpacas, burros, goats, and horses, and invaded by chickens in the evening. We got to know the guys who ran the place at which we were staying, all of whom had lived down there their entire lives. One of them was 78-years-old. He wasn´t always altogether there, but when he was he had great stories of what it was like when he was a kid. It generally boiled down to more fruit-trees, less tourists. But its crazy to think about how long people have inhabited the land down there. Generations and generations. In our explorations we found miles and miles of terraced hillsides for agriculture (mostly abandoned and taken over by cactus), irrigation trenches, and decrepit stone buildings. And we could see trails running all over both sides of the canyon, some of which would make a mountain goat think twice about following.
It was all very wonderful, but we finally mustered the strength to leave, and we needed a lot of it, because the climb was a tough one. We were graced with a cloudy day to keep some of the heat away, and a hidden cache of cookies for a little extra fuel on the trail. We made it back to Cabanaconde just in time for a beautiful sunset, then treated ourselves to a beer, and watched some terrible music videos with half the town on a street corner, to pass the time waiting for our bus back to Chivay. We got there at midnight, found a place to crash, woke up the next morning and boarded another bus back to Arequipa. We exchanged some books and bought some snacks in town, and are now waiting for our overnight bus to Cusco. Machu Pichu here we come.
