The Colca Canyon is the deepest in the world at over 4,500m.
Drop a stone off the edge and it will take over a minute to reach the bottom, unless it hits a condor on the way down. Throwing stones at Condors is not recommended as they have a wingspan of nearly four metres and could probably do you a disservice if they were minded to.
The Colca Valley is a part of Peru that somehow escaped the sweeping changes of independence in 1821 and remained isolated and largely unknown, even by Peruvians. Two American pilots flew over it in 1932 and the National Geographic reported its existence soon after.
The river that runs its 120km length was first navigated by some Polish white water specialists on 1976 and a brief leaf through their book will make your hair stand on end as they negotiated waterfalls and grade 7 rapids with no forewarning.
What draws the crowds now are the largest birds in the world, capable of flight.
They congregate below a viewing platform at 6am and as the sun heats the rocks they launch their massive frames into the thermals that lift them upwards in giant circles, in search of rotting carrion. All this is done without a single flap of their enormous wings.
By 7am they had risen to the platform where we stood.
They soared on the currents, motionless in front of us and passing slowly overhead, as close as a metre or two. The sound of their feathers flapping in the wind, filled the air. For twenty minutes, we were treated to an aerial display of sublime beauty, until, one by one they landed on a rocky promontory, twenty metres from us. It soon became crowded and a fight for prime roosting space unfolded with a series of air born sorties barging those at the edges off in a tangle of giant wings and loud squawking.
Eventually it was over and they meandered further down the valley, just as a legion of day trippers thundered along the canyon road to see what they had already missed. As they descended on the viewing platform, our quiet little group wandered back to the truck, leaving the circus behind us.
In the way back, we sat on the roof of the truck as she rumbled along the dusty road, through tunnels and under power cables and telephone lines we could have brushed with our fingers.
Stopping at the canyon town of Maca, we ate ice cream and posed for photos with a brightly dressed Colca lady, her llama and her freakishly large bird of prey.
What does it feel like to have the six inch talons of a killer embedded in your scalp?
I don’t know because I wore the hat hawk lady gave me.
It’s a shame Nic didn’t.
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