This is the first installment of the story of my travels in Peru, Bolivia and... I've only written up the first two of eight crossings now. Every one has been memorable with details of its own -- and now I'm heading (at relaxed pace?) for numbers nine and next ... This one might stand on its own? I'd like to work up the whole series just because "it is there!"  - Rick(ardo) 

Condors Taking Wing

The sight of a dozen condors taking wing from where they stood on that last highland mountainside was spectacular but finally marred by the occasion. They soared in intersecting circles, climbing skillfully by wing power or uplift, beautiful with their striking white-on-black markings and long wingtip feathers stretching out like fingers grasping the wind. One of the young men jumped out of the pickup and ran to where the birds had been, where a lone llama stood, but he came right back. Two of the other members of the Sayla soccer team that had won the four-team tournament, giving me a lucky ride on their way home over this barely-traveled stretch, informed me that these magnificent birds are not mere scavengers that wait patiently for their meals to die. With a small, spread-out herd, no herder, and Mama Llama its only defender, and in such numbers, "they will attack" even a healthy newborn. The beautiful birds living on death returned to the ground as the pickup wound its way uphill and the defeated Mom stood still in the same place.

   That last mountain ridge is the border between Arequipa and Ayacucho Provinces in south Peru and is surely a power spot of some kind. At 5050 meters (16,500') elevation, it amounts to the final canyon rim of both the Cotahuasi Canyon and its downstream sister, the Huanca Huanca. The grand triangular ridgeline falls straight down to where both canyons end and the rivers join at Chaucalla, an even thousand meters elevation. Coming from Pausa and Corculla, the road goes to the right of the cliffs and over a 15,000-foot pass. Then it winds down innumerable switchbacks to Sayla (11,600'), Tauria (9,350') and finally to Maran (3,940'), at the bottom of the "sister Canyon" -- named Maran there as it changes names between source and sea like all Latin American rivers love to do.

   That river and canyon is about the same depth as several other extreme single-river watersheds of south Peru. I've heard or read claims of "Deepest Canyon in the World" for Colca, Majes (same river as Colca, farthur down), Cotahuasi, Apurimac, even "Canyon of the Condor" somewhere in the Huanca Huanca part of these staggeringly complex and ferocious drainages -- all at least ten thousand feet deep. I doubt that any of them ever show a view of the final rim from the river, or vice-versa, without an airplane. The "Deepest Canyon in the World" claims no longer seem ridiculous to me as they have in the past when I thought of all those higher mountains in Asia. But Kali Gandaki ("Deepest Valley in the World") -- and all but maybe a few (one in China, one in Nepal?) of those more enormous spaces between mountains are evidently finally drained by more than one river, this being the defining point of a "Canyon."

   I spent a night in Sayla after the ride with the soccer team, and then went down to Tauria on the three-day-per-week bus from Cotahuasi whose driver rests there for two hours before the seven-hour return trip. This cut-off area must be one of the most remote inhabited spots in all these Sierras. It is part of Arequipa province rather than Ayacucho, with the border being that very "Great Divide." Trail connections I long to learn and take link it to classic Quechualla, passing far above the impassable lower stretches of Cotahuasi Canyon -- though it is actually in the lower part of the Huanca Huanca/Maran Canyon.

  On the return trip to Cotahuasi, up, up, up all those switchbacks, over the pass, beneath the cliffline ridge above Mama Llama's tragic stand, just before a higher pass (15,750'), fifteen or twenty llamas stood around together untethered, their packsaddles unloaded, holding their after-work conversations, with their piled cargo of gold ore now finding this road access from an old mine far below, somewhere near Sayla. The mine work pays fifty or sixty soles, about twenty bucks a day. Thus the nearly new four-wheel-drive pickup with king cab and roll bar that I'd gotten a ride in, and the new large-screen TV at the corner grocery/bar where I'd found a bed. I warned the woman there about the culture-changing (destroying) longterm effects of this, uh, severe drug addiction, and my statement that the traditional farming life here was "better than the USA" brought simple laughter -- clearly a joke, right? -- "Everyone wants to go to the United States!"

    Topping that final summit, the longest view I've seen of Cotahuasi Canyon, after years spent returning, suddenly appeared. It included a first-time full view of magnificent 20,000-foot Solimana with all its foothills on the opposite side, above my favorite spot, Quechualla, and the canyon's deep point just a few miles downriver.

    OK so it really is one of the most enormous canyons in the world! -- it struck me as the little bus chugged over that grand divide. Hardly a deeper, steeper or more terrible chasm collection exists on this planet within a single river's watershed!

   The rough dirt road to that cut-off stretch is due to be paved in the next few years -- surely not to help autonomous people live independent lives, but for gold mining.