May 10

Y’all thought I was done didn’t you? 🙂

During preparations for this trip Anthea expressed her interest in also going to Rainbow Mountain. This was offered as an add on activity on the “rest” day after returning from Machu Picchu. The tour required a minimum of four people and so Anthea went to work on the group quite early on the tour. In the end nine of the group chose (were convinced?) to go. 

However I think we all shared a moment of doubt when the departure time was to be 5 am. We negotiated it back to 530. 

Very astutely Wilson, our guide, suggested that instead of going to the more popular and crowded Vinicunca that we should go to the lesser known Palccoyo.

Inspired advice as it was simply amazing! 

The colours and vistas were unbelievable. And not crowded. According to the locals it had only been revealed to the outside world the last 20 years or so!

And it was handy having a retired geologist in the group. Apparently Millions of years ago, Palccoyo’s area was submerged under a shallow sea. During this time, different sediments, such as red clay, sandstone, iron oxide, and copper oxide, were deposited on the seafloor, forming layers of different colors. The specific colors are due to the different minerals in each layer of sediments. For example, red clay gives the red color, sandstone provides yellow and orange tones, iron oxide creates the brown color, and copper oxide produces greenish and bluish shades.

The altitude was nothing to sniff at either. 4954m. 

Our local guide was also very astute. He’d gently entice us to the next highest point. Several times when I had announced “Oh I think this is far enough” he’d let us pause for (copious) photos (lots of bracketing) and then encourage us gently on. Aided by Ibolya in our group who bluntly stated, “Well if we’re going to go up this way we may as well just keep going.”

But I should let the photos speak for themselves.