Canyon de Colca

Have been trekking at Colca Canyon for the past 4 days and it was simply AMAZING! The busride from Arequipa to Cabanaconde (a small mountan village in the Canyon from where we started our hike) took about 6 hours. It was´t even that far away (about 250 km´s) from Arequipa it´s just the roads are so bad that a jouney that would normally take 2 hours in Germany or elsewhere in Europe gets streched to 6 hours.

The tiny villages in the canyon were really impressive. I´ve seen places that are just out of this world. The way people live their lifes there seems so hard, they live in tiny houses build out of rocks and dirt, most of them without electricity and running water. The work they do everday on the fields, in the scorching heat, is back-breaking! But after all they seem happy with their lifes and they´re really friendly people.

We stayed the first night in Tapay, in the frontyard of a family with two little kids, Raul & Jesus (who the hell names their kid ´Jesus´?!?). The two boys were so funny and really impressed by all our equipment (tent, backpacks, waterbottles etc.)They kept jumpimg up and down and were all over the place!

During the second day of hiking we met these two old men and started talking to them. They were probably in their 70´s and the one was blind on one eye. He kept talking to me for about 10 minutes, holding my hand the whole time and repeating " rubia bonita" (blonde Schoenheit) while the other one kept inspecting my teva-trekking-sandals going "ooohhh - ahhhh!". It seemed like he´s never seen something like that before.

Some of the hiking was extremely strenuous since we hiked down into the canyon back up on the other side, back down to a Oasis and on the third day all the way back up to Cabanaconde. Most of the evenings we ended up crawling into the tent at 6 in the evening and passing out cause we were so exhausted.
It was also really frustrating to see how the locals manage some of these treks. You can sort of get what I mean if you picture us, two tourists, with huge backpacks with all our hiking & camping-equipment, struggling down these really steep mountain trails trying not to slip or fall and then opposed to that the locals running down the mountain like crazy!!! They probably manage to do a trail that took us about 4 hours in like 40 minutes... how frustrating!!!

After we got back to Arequipa we had another day and am just about to catch the nightbus to Cusco to check out Macchu Picchu and then move on to Lake Titicaca and into Bolivia.