Colca Canyon Trek – Day 2

Thursday 01st October 2015

I could not believe we were already in October!!! I had now been travelling for 3 months!! Already!!! Arghh!!
We started our morning by blowing our nose, because the air was soooo dry!!!

Here is the view of the village in the morning.

We had pancakes for brekky! I remember going to the kitchen to ask if we could help in any way, and seeing that Gloria was making pancakes for us and shouting: “Waouuuu, pancakes, awesome!!!” and when I came back everyone was laughing. I asked what was going on???!!! Miguel had just looked at them in consternation and done the gesture of sliding my neck because everyone had heard me and I had just ruined the surprise. Ahahahaha. Sorry. That was so funny though to see his face. Oooops. And those pancakes looked good!

Session of stretching before to go.

And up we go.

View of the mountains around. To the left is the church`s organ next to which we passed the day before.

Miguel showed us this flower which petals and leaves you can eat which was actually quite tasty, a bit like peppermint.

Going up

We reached a road, on which we continued walking.

View of the canyon

And soon we saw something I had never seen before in my life, a 22 degrees sun halo they call it.

It was like a circular rainbow all around the sun, so exciting to see that!!! Apparently, it is supposed to announce a
big change of weather.

We kept walking to the right and then would do a U-turn and walk to the left on the path we can see in front on this shot.

We got to a small village where we had snacks.

All of us ordered fresh juices of plain maracuya or maracuya-pineapple or maracuya-mango for example.

It was nice to stop a bit and the view we had from there was pretty good!

Leaving the village, here are the local canalisations of the “running water” going around the village and serving different
spots and different houses.

Landscape to the left while we walked.

Another shot

Pretty view

We reached the point where deep down the valley we could see the swimming pool waiting for us!

We ran into this man passing by with his donkey.

Cactus flowers we saw while walking

We kept going down.

We passed this bridge.

View to the right.

View to the left.

The path on which we continued.

Soon we got to the Sangalle oasis where we were staying for the night.

The pool, waiting for us, in which we swam after having dropped our bags in rooms. The water was pretty good!

Heading to little houses where to drop our bags.

Here we were with Karen and Marie-Anne. Karen got the Barbie bed, I got the teddy bear one and can`t remember which one Marie-Anne got!

On the way to the pool, there were those pigs feeding.

Here is the main area where we would gather for drinks and dinner.

While waiting for lunch, I cruised around. The rooster was so weird.

What, do you think I am weird?

What about my face from the other side, am I still looking weird?

Those chicks were funny too with their Texas pants on.

Nice hair style.

It was funny to see the dogs go after the pigs to get them out of the way, moving them up somewhere else.

The cat, happy like only a cat can get.

Around 3pm, just before to start the soup, we were all sitting around a big table and felt some tremor.
It was such a fascinating feeling to have just felt the Earth moving and shaking! No one seemed to worried and I personally
found that really fantastic to be able to feel this, hopefully it would not lead to a real earthquake.

Just after lunch, we saw the property manager making a phone call, looking at the weather. His mobile phone was very high-tech! 😀

We looked outside and the sky had filled with dust. The property manager told us that a rock had fallen on the road nearby and mining activities had to be interrupted. That tremor we felt probably triggered a few rocks to fall which created a lot of dust.

We hanged around at the table we had had lunch and had happy hour drinks.

Miguel put up a show where he was dancing like crazy on his awesome playlist. Then we got ready to go find some firewood to make a fire in the evening. There was this baby cow which was like a pet, so cute.

Off we went down to go find some wood.

Just before to go down, there was this tyre recycled into a laundry washing basket.

We collected wood for half-hour.

Here was the result of our collection.

Then we went down in the river to play. Here is Michael, holding up a rock while I am taking the photo. “Quick, it is heavy!” he said. 🙂

Long exposure shot of the river.

Condors power!

A bit of climbing to go back up

And the fire, lit up later on.

The ironic thing is that the ones who enjoyed the fire the most were not even our group. We were sitting at a table nearby having beers. But then we got closer but Condors do it in style you know, so we did move our table and chairs next to the fire.

Dinner time, the main after the soup.

There was this hilarious moment where Miguel left the table and this dog jumped on his seat and sat there quietly looking at us, waiting for some food. Hey, Miguel, what happened to you, you changed a lot! 🙂

In the kitchen was this very cute little lamb. Was he a pet of the property or getting familiar with the place where he would turn into meat…who knows..

Miguel gave us a briefing about the next day morning walk. We would start walking at 5am and go up and up and up for about 3 hours. We were all pretty tired and didn`t stay around too long after dinner and went to bed. I tried to do a few night shots that evening but there were lots of clouds.