Colca is a canyon in the Andes of southern Peru, more than three kilometres deep in places, and the condors here do not come out of the sky. They come up from underneath. At Cruz del Cóndor the rim stands at 3,780 metres, with the river more than 1,250 metres below. So you watch the empty gorge rather than the sky, and the first birds appear below the railing and climb past it. The Andean condor has the largest wing area of any living bird, a span reaching 3.3 metres, and it is too heavy to take off without rising warm air. The show therefore starts in mid-morning, once the sun has worked on the rock, and not at dawn. Before that the gorge is at its quietest, mist pooling in the depths while the high walls go grey to gold.
The walls under you are stepped with terraces a thousand years old, still worked. The river runs too deep in its own gorge to be tapped, so all of them drink from springs: 103 of them, fed down 62 channels into 74 holding tanks. A rotating official the valley calls the Yaku Alcalde keeps the ledger of whose turn it is, and skipping the annual canal-clearing costs you that turn. The women here are Collagua or Cabana, and the hats tell which: stiff white, or straw embroidered with bright flowers. Before the Spanish the two peoples shaped infants' skulls instead, tall and narrow like the sacred volcano or wide and flat like the sun, until a viceroy banned it and the difference moved to hats. From Cabanaconde a trail drops about 1,100 metres to the floor at Sangalle in three hours and takes four hours to get you back out. Nothing about the birds is promised. On a grey morning the rock never warms, the lift never builds, and the condors stay low against the far wall while the rim waits for heat that does not come.