Colca Canyon

Hello all,

This week I finally got to talk with my artesan group´s president and made some headway with resuscitating the residential tourism group. These are both excellent signs because they mean I am finally working on what I was brought over here to do, small business. I´m continuing my English classes of course, although I cut back my adult classes to just the teachers because they were the only ones who really showed an interest. I´m not sure if this is genuine disinterest or just the chacra keeping people from wanting to come or hearing about the class, but I won´t bother with the regular population classes again until I´ve made some headway with the tourism, when they´ll really want to be able to say some basic things in English.
Otherwise, things are going pretty well in town. I´ve settled into a routine for classes and meetings, which can get kind of boring but seems to be on the way to yielding results. I still have the mountains to look at every time I walk out the door, which helps recharge me when I´m not feeling particularly like going to a meeting. These mountains and the wide-open sky above them have a different look and color every day, and some sunsets are simply indescribably beautiful. So I´ll certainly survive the monotony of work since my environment offers me anything but that.
This week I figured I’d touch on the region I’m in right now, the Colca Canyon. There is a bit of a debate on whether this is the deepest canyon in the world, but all agree that if not Colca it is the Cotahuasi Canyon, also in Peru. A group of Polish explorers just mounted an expedition into some unexplored reaches of Colca with the intent of establishing it once again as the deepest in the world, but I have yet to here about the outcome.
The canyon itself isn’t like the classical example of the Grand Canyon with its sheer walls diving down from a fairly flat surface. Colca is nestled in the Andes Mounains, so the canyon sides slope down from huge mountain peaks and make more of a V than a straight plunge. There are several towns nestled on the lip of the canyon, underneath or on the side of mountain peaks, and the upper reaches are thinly populated with llama and alpaca farmers that rarely come down into the valley.
My last post described the tourist attractions of my town, which pretty much encompasses the tourist attractions of our side of the canyon excluding the whitewashed old churches that each town boasts. On the other side of the canyon is Cabadaconde and its Cruz del Condor, which attracts the vast majority of tourists in the canyon. Cruz del Condor is an outlook that overlooks the canyon, although not the most impressive portion by any means. The real attraction is the fact that condors fly across the canyon there frequently and can pass quite close to the outlook point. Other attractions are the numerous hot springs and the adventure sports possibilities such as rock climbing and mountain biking. Lastly, if you climb up behind the ridge directly behind my side of the canyon (or take a round-about route by car) you can reach the origin of the mighty Amazon River, something I’ve yet to do but would like to get around to before too long.