Hiking Colca Canyon... Technically

I want to start this post with an apology to my mother and a disclaimer that desperate times call for desperate measures.

After about 2.5 hours of sleep, Sinead and I woke up at 2:30 on Tuesday morning to leave Arequipa for the Colca Canyon trek. 

Besides for our bus being late, par for the course in South America, everything started out grand.  When we got on board, we were given neck pillows and blankets so that we could go back to sleep for the next 3.5 hours until breakfast and a lookout point to spot Condors, the giant birds the canyon is famous for. 

Sinead and I had previously decided to save a bit of money and do the trek on our own without a guide.  We had heard from numerous people at the past two hostels we were at and some of Sinead's friends from back home that it was an easy hike to do on your own.  The hike was three hours down into the canyon, where you reached an oasis with a hostel to spend the night at hot springs and a two and a half hour hike back up the next day which started before sunrise in order to avoid the extreme heat. 

After breakfast, we got back in the van and were driven to town to start the trek.  We got a map (though that's a very loose term for what it actually was) from the information center in "town" - a very desolate and rural area - and headed on our way. 

Within the first ten minutes, we saw the sign that the woman at the information office had mentioned, but there was a fork in the road.  There were no words, only pictures, and we couldn't tell if the sign was telling us to go over the 3.5 foot rock wall and follow the trail or head to the right and follow another trail. 

Luckily, there was a local woman who assured us that we should go over the wall.  We continued on the path for a while and eventually ran into a dead end.  The path ended at a steep cliff.  We decided, obviously, that we had to turn around, and head to the other side of the ridge where there looked like there were multiple paths. 

We walked through corn fields, fields of ashes burned from down trees, through bushes, did our best to avoid cactii (though we both got pricked at least once,) over rock walls, climbed boulders and eventually made it to the other side.  Somehow, though, we couldn't get to a ledge to look down into the canyon.  There appeared to be hundreds of paths, yet every single one led to a dead end.

In retrospect, we probably should have never climbed that rock wall.  I'm pretty sure our two hour adventure was solely located on someone's private farm land.  During the time we had tried to find the correct path, we literally made it NOWHERE.

Eventually we decided to admit defeat.

I mean people climb mountains to see the view from the TOP right?!?

Surely there was really no reason to hike down INTO the canyon...we were already AT the top.  How could the views get any better?  We had seen the canyon, we had seen the condors.  That's all anyone ever REALLY needed to know anyways.

We decided no one would ever ask us whether we had hiked the WHOLE canyon, just IF we had hiked the canyon.  Technically, we HAD hiked the canyon, just not the right part.

At this point, we still had time to get  back to town and catch a taxi to Chavay, where the ONLY bus (we had been told) left for Puno at 1:30. 

We made it back to town and started asking the locals about a taxi.  It became very clear very quickly that there was NO WAY we were getting a taxi.  There were no taxis in this town the locals would tell us as they smirked or laughed.  There was a bus to Chavay coming at 2, they told us... a half an hour AFTER the bus we needed to take  left over an hour away. 

Our next genius idea was to try and convince the police officers we ran into to give us a lift back to Chavay.  In VERY broken Spanish, we tried to explain to them that we had attempted to hike the canyon and that I had fallen and hurt my ankle... I even limped as we walked up to them.  Sinead "claims" that at one point I changed the story and started rubbing my wrist instead of my ankle, but this accusation can neither be supported nor confirmed.  Either way, the police wouldn't budge, and we were back to square one.

We then decided to bribe one of the locals to give us a ride.  There were a total of two trucks in the main square.  We approached the first man with a car and asked if he'd take us back to Chavay if we were willing to pay him.  We had planned to start with 30 soles and go up to 50.  He told us he would do it for no less than 200.  Keep in mind that the average daily wage in Peru is $3 USD and this man was asking for about $85 for two hours of driving.  Also keep in mind that all he was doing instead was leaning against a wall and continiously spitting on the ground. 
Feeling defeated, we began to walk across the square to ask the information center for another option, though we were sure they were only going to reiterate what we already knew. 

As we were walking, I noticed a man walking behind us toward the only other car.  He approached us and offered us a ride.  He was driving a Movistar truck, a very large phone company in South America, and since it was a Tuesday afternoon, we figured he must be on duty. 

He told us that he was going to a town ten minutes away from Chavay and that he could drive us there.

Ignoring every single thing we'd ever heard NOT to do, we accepted his offer.  Later, we both said how we could hear our mother's voices in the back of our heads yelling at us and promised not to tell them for years - if ever. 

A million thoughts went through my head about all of the things that could go wrong, but I kept trying to tell myself to believe in the good in people.  If there were travelers in DC and I was going within ten minutes of that direction, I'd offer them a ride.  Additionally there was only one road to Chavay, so we knew we were going the right way. 

At one point he stopped to show us the oasis down below. Not believing 100% that everything would work out, as we got out of the car I left my door open and made sure to stand between the man and the car so that he couldn't bolt back in, steal our stuff, and drive away.  He didn't. He just wanted to show us a nice view.

The conversation was very limited.  The man, whose name we never learned, we shamefully realized later, spoke no English, and though Sinead is better than I am at Spanish, we had no hope.  The conversation lasted maybe two minutes of the hour plus ride. 

Exhausted from our 2:30 am wake up, our "hike," and a rough sleep on an overnight bus the night before that, we both struggled to stay awake.  Next to accepting a ride from a strange man in a foreign country, falling asleep while hitchhiking with a strange man is absolutely something you should never do. 

In the end, everything worked out perfectly.  Though he had told us that he would take us to a town ten minutes away from Chavay, he ended up dropping us directly in the town center, only a few minute walk from the hostel we had left our bags at.  Originally we had thought that he had heard us offering money to the other man and that he expected some sort of payment, though we never discussed the amount. 

When the ride was over, he got out of the car.  We went to offer him money, but instead he gave us hugs and kisses on the cheek and continuously wished us "buena suerte" (good luck,) probably wondering how we would fair for the rest of out journey.

Though we missed the 1:30 bus, we decided there HAD to be another way to Puno, picked up our bags, and headed to the bus station with high hopes. 

We figured out a way to get to Puno through two connecting local buses.

Though Peru typically has very nice buses, the buses we took to Puno were local buses as opposed to tourist buses and our "transfer" point was when the driver pulled over to the side of the road, told us to get out and assured us that another bus would be by to pick us up soon that would take us to Puno.  He was right, within a few minutes, two buses came by.  Neither stopped. 

The temperature had dropped significantly from where we had started our day, and Sinead wanted to change from her shorts into pants.  There was literally nowhere to go, and we joked that if she changed into her pants on the side of the road, we'd surely get a bus to stop.  Since pretty much anything goes in Peru (and all of South America,) she decided to go for it, and sure enough, as soon as she pulled her shorts down a bus pulled over to let us in... we were back on track and headed on our way to Puno.

In total, the ride ended up costing us much less than the 1:30 tourist bus would have and together we saved about $70 USD.  We arrived in Puno, exhausted, around 10pm, grabbed a pack of noodles for dinner, and went to bed for what would be our final sleep in Peru.  

Photos:
1: Sinead and I at Colca Canyon
2: The canyon
3: Me at Colca Canyon