Estamos en Cabanaconde
Cabanaconde – a small town in Peru that makes you feel like you’ve stepped back in time, far off the beaten track… with horses and dogs outnumbering vehicles, and locals that seem genuinely happy to see a foreigner… and maybe even excited when you eat at their local chicken joint and tell them that the meal you ate was ‘muy rico’ i.e. really delicious… I don’t think in Australia, England or many places we’ve been to in South America that that sentence alone would give you bragging rights… and the lady in the shop then went and told a group of locals sitting at another table what we’d said 🙂
The town of Cabanaconde is located in the Colca Canyon, and is a very chilled out place within walking distance of many spectacular miradors (viewpoints) and trailheads…
Our first stroll around Cabanaconde took us to the Mirador de Arhachihua – a viewpoint on the edge of town. The walk there was pretty nice, through the quiet streets of town, past the bullring, and then along a small trail. The way there wasn’t that awesomely signposted, so we ended up taking a bit of a scenic detour to our own viewpoint before reaching the official viewpoint!
Reaching the ‘official’ viewpoint means that you are officially in the canyon… somewhere you can’t be without purchasing a Boleto Turistico (Tourist Ticket)… Lucky for us there was a man stationed at the viewpoint selling the tickets, so we didn’t need to worry about being caught in the canyon without a ticket…
The viewpoint isn’t just a viewpoint… it’s also the official start of one of the multi-day trails… so we decided to stroll along the trail for a bit – the trail was pretty quiet and the scenery and views into the canyon were stunning…
The town of Cabanaconde is pretty tiny, but it has a lovely main square with a big church, and a cool condor statue on top of a column…
Our second stroll from the centre of Cabanaconde took us to the ruins of Kallimarca… which according to information we’d found online was about a 4 hour round trip… and to be honest, it probably would have been if we hadn’t taken a number of wrong turns.. but that obviously wasn’t our fault and purely down to bad signage 😉
We started by taking the road to Huambo.. we walked past a number of fields being farmed by locals, until we reached a signpost telling us to turn left, which we dutifully did…
Turning left we joined a narrow path which led us between farmers’ fields… and also past a field full of andean lapwings and a few other birds 🙂 There were no other tourists on the trail, but many locals were working on their fields… We strolled along the path until we reached the main road – where in the distance there was a signpost to the ruins telling us to turn right… the sign looked like it was meant for car drivers… and instructions online had implied that that was the case… SO rather than walk the implied 1.1km on the road… we took the path on the right hoping it was the pedestrian way to the ruins…
The path we took had great views of the surrounding countryside, and was relatively flat… we also found a great shady spot under a big tree for lunch… however by the time we reached our lunch spot it had become ever increasingly obvious that it wasn’t the path to the ruins 🙁 A local lady who’d come from farming her field passed us while we were having lunch, and a conversation with her confirmed that we were on a wild beaver chase… to reach the correct path – according to her – we needed to return to the road and turn right by the farmhouse….
We walked along the trail by the side of the farmhouse, winding our way upwards, among the sometimes quite thick vegetation trying to avoid being stabbed by cacti!… After about 30 minutes it dawned on us that this really wasn’t the correct way either, and was nothing more than a second wild beaver chase… it may well have been the old trail (I’m giving the old lady the benefit of the doubt here… but was so overgrown we were not reaching the ruins this way…). We proceeded to return to the road… something that wasn’t quite as easy as it first seemed as there was a big ridge in the way that we needed to get around…
Once back at the road, we were determined to find the ‘real’ path… which we did… 🙂
We followed the uphill trail and were afforded with awesome views over the farmed terraces… at the top we found the ruins – some crumbling walls that you really had to look for to find – there’s not much left of the ruinas de Kallimarca! In spite of a lack of ruins, the views at the top ARE awesome and we declared them worth the climb!!!
The walk back to town was a little more straightforward… and we managed to easily retrace our steps back to the big smoke of Cabanaconde…
We really enjoyed our stay in Cabanaconde… the scenery is AMAZING and the feeling of being a million miles away from everything and everyone was awesome – but that’s not to say the tranquility lasted 24/7…. Even though most tours don’t overnight here, or really spend any time in this small town…. if you’re up early enough – and we were – you do see BIG numbers of tourists and it’s quite a shock to the system!!!