BIG BIRDS!!!

Hey hey! I've had a wonderful weekend!! On Saturday morning, the Calvin crew loaded onto a bus and rode out to Canyon Country!! Our destination was Colca Canyon, which is about four hours outside of Arequipa. The bus ride was breathtaking. Oh my my! Really, look at these pictures.

Look at my beautiful friends!!! I'm so thankful for these ladies!!

We drove past many vicuñas! They are related to llamas, and it was pretty cool to get to see them in the wild because I've learned about them in some of my classes at the university! They were highly valued animals during the Incan Empire.

Look at all these llamas! Or, they might be alpacas. I can't tell a difference.



We stopped along the way and Professor Zandstra bought us all tea! It's called mate de coca, and it's made out of coca leaves, which is what cocaine is made out of. The altitude is very high, and the coca leaves have stuff in them that help with altitude sickness. So, we all had quite a bit of mate de coca this weekend. I am used to tea being made out of a tea bag, so it took me by surprise that mate de coca was made stright from the coca leaves, but it was good!

  

Along the way, we stopped at the Mirador de los Andes, where we had an absolutely beautiful view of a very small (yet very impressive!) part of the Andes Mountains! LOOK AT THOSE!!!! OHHHHHHH!!

There really aren't words to express how majestically awesome this view was.

God made some really cool shaped stuff.

I assure you that this picture is real.

After this awesome bus ride, we arrived at our hotel near the Colca Canyon. Fuller and I shared a room, and we all checked in when we got there. After check-in, we ate lunch, which was a buffet provided by the hotel. We all enjoyed this a lot--it was really good food!! After our lunch, we took a short hike with our guide. From the hotel, we walked up to a high rocky place where we could see a good bit of the valley. It was so pretty!!!

This is along the way on our little walk.



This is the view that we had of the valley. We spent a while sitting on the rocks and taking pictures and exploring before returning to our hotel.

 





And here's our hotel.

After our little walk, we all piled into the bus again and drove a short ways to some hot springs!! This place was right next to the river, and there were five different pools that ranged from 97 to 105 degrees. We had a great time there, relaxing in the water!! And I decided that I think that hot springs are quite mind boggling. There's just all this hot water coming out of the ground! That's crazy!! The pools don't need heaters, because the water is just... really hot!

We got back from the hot springs and ate dinner at the hotel, and dinner was just as delicious as lunch! I must admit that we all ate... a whole lot this weekend. The food was very abundant and yummy, and everyone went up for seconds... and then thirds... and sometimes fourths and fifths.

After dinner, it was dark outside, so Amy, Scott, Sydney, and I went outside to look at the stars. The hotel had some hammocks set up, and Sydney and I thought we could share one. That worked out for a while, but after a few minutes, the hammock collapsed. I'm not sure what happened, but all of the sudden, we were on the ground. But no worries!--the hammock wasn't far off the ground. We both walked away with minimal injuries. I landed on my bottom, and that region is currently quite... tender. Sitting down is slightly tricky (which made today's bus ride slightly uncomfortable), but for all of the laught that came out of this incident, the slight discomfort is totally worth it!!

Scott, Sydney, and I ended up staying up until midnight last night. This was definitely the best part of the weekend. We saw some amazing things, but none of them compared with getting to know these friends better and spending time with them. We just stood in the field behind out hotel and stared at the stars for (literally) hours, talked about so many different things, laughed, tried to talk to the cows who were grazing nearby, prayed, and shared life together.

The stars were awesome!! There were SO MANY of them!! Oh man--they were all over! AND THEY WERE TWINKLING!! Yeah, some of them were actually changing colors. We looked this up to confirm that we're not crazy, and we're not! The stars really do change colors!! This happens as the light passes through the earth's atmosphere. And we saw many (six) shooting stars, too!

At midnight, we decided that we really should go to bed, mainly because we had been told that we would be woken up at 5 AM in order to go to breakfast at 5:30 and leave the hotel at 6 AM. So, we didn't get much sleep, but I have no regrets! The beds at the hotel were really really comfortable, though!

At 5:00 on the dot, an employee of the hotel knocked on our door to wake us up. We were a bit groggy, but breakfast was delicious, of course! We piled into the bus and drove two hours to the Cruz del Condor. Once again, the bus ride was beyond breathtaking! The road went along one side of the canyon for the whole time.

Colca Canyon is the home of Andean Condors, which are enormous birds! They have the largest wingspan of any land bird--10 feet!! The Cruz del Condor is a lookout where people go to see these amazing birds. We saw a bunch of them! They were just gliding back and forth in the canyon, and it was awesome to see!! I have never in my life seen anything like it! At one point, one flew right over our heads--oh man, it was crazy!!!

The view from Cruz del Condor was magnificent!!

And look! See that bird??? It's a condor! I know it looks little... but it's really really big!!

Here's another one!! It is so cool to watch them glide around!!

This isn't a bird picture. It's a mountain and sky picture.

The river was REALLY FAR down there!!



  After staring at birds and mountains for a while, we took another short walk to another lookout place where we looked at birds and moutains for a while longer.

 Eventually, we got back in the bus and headed back to Arequipa. We made stops on the way to eat lunch and take some pictures of the valley, and on the busride back, Sydney and I made up a story about a dragon before we fell asleep.

We saw lots of landscapes like this over the weekend. See all of these terraces that are built into the valley? They are really old!! They are pre-Incan, which means that they are over 1,500 years old! The people who lived here created them for agriculture so that they could plant and harves on the uneven land. First of all, that's brilliant. Second of all, those are really old!!