Meeting people, getting to Colca, and more new people

At school one morning, I met a girl named Teisha. Without knowing her for too long, we decided to take a weekend trip to Colca Canyon. She’s a second-year med student from Salt Lake City who is traveling for 9 weeks through South America. One night Teisha and I took a salsa class and met an English girl named Olivia, who is on her second “gap year” from London. Olivia, also a med student, was interested in our trip and decided to come along.

Colca Canyon is more than twice as deep as the Grand Canyon and there are many tour companies that offer different trips to visit it. We decided on a three-day trek. In order to get to our destination with enough time to hike to the campsite on the first day, we had to leave Arequipa at 3 a.m.! I don’t care where you’re going in the US, but your tour group is not leaving at three in the morning, that much I know. So, I took a nap on Friday afternoon and set my alarm, which turned out to be unnecessary because Tula came in to check on me, had prepared tea and a snack and waited with me until the tour group picked me up, which wasn’t until 3:45-ish. My own mom (no offense mom) wouldn’t even have done that.

So, after a hellish overnight bus trip, we arrived in Chivay with frost on the windows, ate breakfast and then continued on. Along the way, we stopped at an observation point where it was possible to see multitudes of condors. Five minutes would have been enough, but we were there 40… Finally we reached Cabanaconde around lunchtime, where Teisha, Olivia, and I discovered that we were not moving on with the rest of the people that were on our bus, but had our own personal guide, named Diego. But, as luck would have it, ms. serendipity intervened. Before leaving the town for our first trek, Diego ran off to buy something and he came back with three Irish people who had been looking for a guide, so it turned out that we were actually going to be a group of 7. These three, Rachel, Hugh, and Aine (Irish for Anna, pronounced Aña) were just amazing to trek with, and we were so fortunate that they joined us.

These are the condors.