The Cruz del Condor
The most famous tourist attraction in the Colca Canyon is the Cruz del Condor. It’s famous because it’s relatively easy to see condors there – yes condors! 🙂 They are mostly active first thing in the morning and last thing in the afternoon.
It’s around 14km away from Cabanaconde, and with infrequent buses – so our strategy was to take the 7am bus to arrive at around 7.30am, spend a couple of hours there, and then walk back to Cabanaconde taking in some other viewpoints on the way back.
When we arrived it was very quiet – the hoards of tour buses hadn’t arrived yet 🙂 But then on the other hand, neither had the condors…. 🙁
There is quite a large area with walkways where you can wander around and look at the views and try and spot condors. The problem is always deciding which area to go to to try and find the condors! Finally we saw some! Yes! 🙂 But unfortunately they had their backs to us, and were quite far away…. losers…
We watched the four condors on the cliff for a bit, hoping that they would all turn around 🙂 But they didn’t move a lot, so we decided to head down the trail to some other viewing platforms.
This area turned out to be pretty good (that, or the condors decided to come out….) and we saw loads and loads of condors flying around, and occasionally landing. They were very hard to take pictures of – especially when they were flying – that’s our excuse anyway – but they were great to watch! 🙂 We had a great couple of hours watching the condors!
Satisfied with our condor viewings, it was time to start the walk back to Cabanaconde. It was getting quite hot, and in the end it was quite a tiring walk – we figured that by the time we had added on the detours to the viewing points, the total distance back was around 17km.
But it was worth the toil, as there were great views all along the road on the way back, and we saw lots of nice birds (that weren’t condors! 🙂 )
By the time we got back to Cabanaconde, it was around 4.30pm – a long but very enjoyable day – and good training for our next hike – which was going to be a lot tougher, as we were going to go down in to the canyon…