Hiking Colca Canyon

I have a few minutes beforeour bus leavesfor Cusco, so here´s recap of last week´s amazing backpacking trip!

From Arequipa we took a 6 hour bus ride to the remote mountain town of Cabanaconde. Cabanaconde sits at the rim of hte Colca Canyon, the 2nd deepest canyon in the world and home to 9 or 10 remote Quechuan farming communities, connected to each other only by the narrow foot paths eatched across the rocky mountainsides. As our bus snaked up the dusty roads I could see in the distance, the crumbling rock had been leveraged into thousands of flat green terraced fields. In a place of extremes,losing just the topmost layer of soil can render a terrace completely unproductive, and these people have been practicing true sustainable farming techniques and maintaining crops in the most unbelievable conditions for not just hundreds , but thousands of years...pretty amazing
Most of the jobs in Cabanconde come from farming and tourism. It sits at the edge of the 3 main trails that lead to into the Colca. These people think nothing of climbing from the base of the canyon up 2000 meters to Cabanoconde every day to buy supplies, sell supplies, or lead tourists down. Distances here are all measured in time, and there is tourist time (let´s say, 5 hours to get to a particular town) and local time (2 hours to get to the same place!)
The next day we decided to check out hte trails leading around Cabanaconde, through the dirt roads, past the mud brick and thatched roof homes, the dry yards, donkeys, and horses, the bull fighting ring (a popular past time here) made of stacked rocks forming a wall and corrugated aluminum doors which are meant to hold the bulls (somehow),past dry grazing pastures to a vista where you can struly see hte vastnessof the Colca. Peering down...and down and down! we could see the first stop on what had suddenly turned into a serious backpacking trip!--The Oasis, also known as we could see the town of Sangalle, almost directly below Cabanaconde. It makes you dizzy to look so far down at this tiny green patch of trees and palms sitting in the shadowy brown and greys of the canyon.
We were so excited to see the canyon unfold before us, waterfalls and tiny terraced fields in the distance, sitting like jewels in the cascades of dry rock. 3 hours later we had locked up the luggage we didn´t need and were hiking down the first trail to Sangalle, the Oasis. The sun blazed against our heads as we treked down the zigzagging switchbacks, lined with boulders and flowering cacti. A few red faced tourists were puffing up the trail. It looked pretty painful with both the altitude and the mountain working against them. A few more had taken donkeys up and smiled at us sheepishly.
To be continued...with pictures!