Condor Spotting

The reason for travelling to Arequipa was to visit Colca Canyon - it's the worlds deepest canyon, twice the depth of the Grand Canyon and famous for its condors. We looked at the tour options and whilst we are of course tourists ourself the trip really did look too touristy and so we arranged with the tour company to do an edited version.

We arrived at Arequipa bus terminal a little before 11am, to the sound of the panpipe version of  'When a child is born' by Johnny Mathis blasting out around the terminal. Our bus journey to Yanque was uneventful though longer than expected. The landscape had changed again, lower, browner and even more baron hills.

The bus stopped in a fairly remote looking place and we, along with a local young mother of two, were the only people to disembark we clearly looked lost and she kindly offered to walk us to the Plaza de Armas.

Killawasi, our hotel was perfect - with stunning views from our room so perfect in fact that we arranged to stay for another night.

The view from our room in Yanque

At 6:30 on Thursday we were picked up by the tour group, as anticipated it was very touristy stopping repeatedly en route to Colca Canyon to allow us to photograph local children dancing, local children with pocket sized versions of sheep and alpacas and adults with condors - these were not pocket sized by any stretch of the imagination.

A pocket sized alpaca

Not a great shot but a condor none the less

I wasn't feeling great when we got back, fairly sure that it's the altitude so I went to bed for a few hours - Abs walked in to town and was 'mugged' by four 4 year olds, the story she relayed was hysterical......

Next stop Puno to visit the Peruvian side of Lake Titicaca - see you there.

Raine x