Laguna Qorikocha, a Quechua word that means ‘Golden lake‘ is located at approximately 4020 m.a.s.l. in Cusco.
Diego once mentioned that he had been to a very quiet lagoon up in the highlands of Ccorao, a place where it was also possible to fish. Without hesitation, we decided to depart in the direction of this place the following day.
We arrived in Ccorao very early in the morning, at 6:30 am approximately and had a delicious lamb soup in the local market. It was Saturday and there were a lot of sale stalls offering many products from the region. Ccorao is well known because of its production of strawberries and its derivatives.
Personally, I feel sorry for the suffering of animals, so fishing is something I don’t really enjoy, so I wasn’t any excited specifically about this activity.
We started trekking up and the way seemed fun. Of course, we made some stops on the way to rest a little bit, because we knew this was going to take us some time. The landscape was becoming more and more breathtaking as we were going up. We found what seemed to be a water dam, which I imagine was for the crops that lay around.
After three hours of walking, we suddenly got to the promised lagoon. Once there we wanted to walk on its shores. The land under the water was almost firm, enough to walk around and look for fish. When we realized it was possible to continue walking, we dared to get deeper inside and swim. It was an astounding experience. I just felt a little bit scared when some lakeweed touched my feet while swimming.
We enjoyed the lagoon so much that we forgot to fish and ended up eating oranges and playing ‘uno‘ altogether.
