Colca Canyon (day two) the oasis

Day two in the Colca Canyon began at the reasonable hour of 7am.  We had pancakes with bananas for breakfast!  Its amazing how familiar food makes you so happy when you are travelling.  It was definitely the best pancake Ive ever eaten.  This was definitely my favorite day of the three spent trekking.  We went through several small villages and got to meet some of the local people.  First we had to climb up a bit, while we were exhausting ourselves in the hot sun hiking up the canyon we came across an 80 year old man, hunched over, and hiking in only his socks.  It made us feel kind of silly, all the tourists come there with their fancy hiking boots, trekking pants and poles, and still have a hard time.  Meanwhile the people that live there have been hiking around the canyon for centuries with so much less.  Then we made it up to the villages partway up the canyon where they fed us some local fruits, liqour, and showed us a small museum about how they sustain themselves in the canyon.  The fruit in Peru is incredible, there are so many that Ive never seen before, and things like papayas are the size of your head!  We ate giant kiwi-like fruits that were very sour, and other local banana-like fruits.  The villagers mostly grow avacados and oranges and then carry them up to villages in the upper canyon that are accessible by road to be traded for other goods.  But tourism has also become a very big deal in the canyon, which they definitely have figured out.  We all had to buy water as we went along, which cost 5 times as much as it did in Arequipa.

After about 4 hours we reached our hostel for the evening.  If I thought the first place was great, this one was ridiculous.  It could only be described as a Caribean-like island in the middle of a desert canyon!  There were palm trees, and pools, and bamboo huts to sleep in.  I definitely enjoyed myself, but it is also a bit odd to be staying in a place you know is completely un-natural and has been built just for the tourists that are visiting there.  We spent the evening learning different card games from all the countries we were from.  The Belgians had this bizarre deck of cards that only had the number 7 and up, which is apparently very common there.  Then we went to bed super early because the next day we were suppoed to get up at 5am to trek out of the canyon!