The Colca for Two: The Canyon at Dawn, Hot Water at Dusk

The Colca is almost always visited badly. The standard version leaves Arequipa at three in the morning, reaches the condor viewpoint alongside four hundred other people, and returns the same day with everyone asleep on the bus. Two thousand metres of canyon — twice the depth of the Grand Canyon — reduced to a twenty-minute stop.

The version worth having begins the previous afternoon and lasts two nights.

Dawn, without the bus

Condors use the thermals that rise once the sun begins to warm the canyon wall: they appear between eight and ten, not earlier. Arriving early achieves nothing except securing your place, and if you slept forty minutes from the viewpoint rather than three hours away, you arrive rested and at the right hour. A bird with a three-metre wingspan passing at eye level without beating its wings requires no one's commentary.

The middle hours

The day can be filled or not. The pre-Inca terraces of the valley are still farmed, walking them is easy and level, and there are villages with white churches where nothing in particular happens — which is sometimes exactly the point. Our recommendation is not to fill the afternoon: the Colca rewards whoever sits down to look at it.

And the water, at the end

The valley is volcanic and the water leaves the ground above sixty degrees; it cools to thirty-eight in stepped pools. Getting in at dusk, when the air drops to five degrees and the steam rises in columns, is one of the few things in Peru that works exactly as you imagined it. A private pool can be reserved. That is what turns a thermal bath into something else.

Two nights, not one. The Colca punishes haste more than anywhere else in the south.