Montaña Palcoyo
Wednesday, March 6
A great place to go hiking in Peru is the area around Cusco. There, there are countless mountains, lagoons, rock formations, and breathtaking landscapes. Since we didn't have time for a long hiking tour, we took a few day trips to various locations instead. This weekend we had booked a guided tour to the Palcoyo Mountain.
The Andean region around Cusco is so vast and mountainous that many of the most beautiful places and mountains are not connected to the road network and are difficult to reach by car. With the expansion of the road network in the Andes, more and more of these places are becoming accessible. Tour operators in Cusco are adapting their tour options and destinations to Peruvian and international tourists accordingly, continually offering new tours to previously inaccessible places in the Andes. A few years ago, tour operators began promoting the “Rainbow Mountain”. The actual name of the mountain, “Vinicunca”, was replaced with the much more striking name Rainbow Mountain in order to attract as many tourists as possible. The mountain got its new name because it consists of colorful stripes of rock due to various minerals in the soil and rocks and indeed looks stunning. This new destination quickly became so popular with tourists that more and more tour buses arrived there every day. Each day more and more tourists took a tour to the rainbow mountains that in 2023, approximately 2,000 tourists were being taken to the mountain every day. The beautifully situated mountain in the middle of the Andes was now full of food stalls, kiosks, souvenir shops, and simply was completely overrun with tourists.
When Christoph and I were planning our trip to Peru, it was clear that we didn't want to be part of this kind of mass tourism. We did a little research (in Spanish) online and discovered that there were actually many other colorfully striped mountains in the region that were just as beautiful but lesser known. In Cusco, we found one of the few tour operators that offered tours to Montaña Palcoyo — an alternative to the crowded Rainbow Mountain. On the day of the tour, we met up with our guide and the rest of the group early in the morning and drove for a few hours into the Cusco countryside. The journey took us through the greenest meadows I had ever seen, we drove past remote villages and hills where wild herds of llamas grazed. The journey itself was beautiful, and although I've traveled extensively in the Cusco region, I felt like I'd never been that remote in the Andes before. The mountains around us suddenly took on a variety of colors: light green, dark green, a bluish shimmer, and then suddenly a deep dark red. We didn't encounter any other busses during the entire journey, and we seemed to be the only ones there. Finally, the bus parked on a tiny parking lot, we got out, and began hiking. The hike itself wasn't particularly demanding; the only challenging part was that the parking lot was already at 4700 meters, making any physical exertion even more strenuous due to the altitude. We slowly followed the trail up into the mountains and could hardly believe how beautiful the mountains around us were. At the highest point of the hike, at almost 5,000 meters, we were treated to a stunning panorama of mountain ranges in various colors, snow-capped peaks in the distance, and green meadows. It was especially amazing that our group, consisting of about 10 people, was the only one on the entire mountain. This hike was definitely one of the most beautiful we've ever done!
