Month: April 2019

We had a hard time working out the route we’d take through Colombia. Aside from arriving in Bogotá, passing through Medellín, and flying out from Cartagena, we never really got that far in our pre-planning process. Would we head toward Cali and the Pacific? Would we skirt the Venezuelan border? Would we go all the way north to Santa Marta and work our way west along the Caribbean coast, or would we come up closer to Panama and head east to our final stop? Colombia always seemed so distant, even as we were bouncing along through Brazil.

We decided against Cali – nothing in the tour books or TripAdvisor piqued our interest. We also declined the adventure sport party-towns of San Gil and Bucaramanga, though those areas are undoubtably a blast for people younger and less tired than we are. We could have gone straight from Bogotá to Medellín, but where’s the fun in trading one metro area for another?

We opted for a nature route which Lea found on TomPlanMyTrip (the same site that directed us to San José del Guaviare) that would take us on a circuitous path through the Andean cloud forest one last time, pausing to see the sights in two scenic mountain towns. There are no direct buses to either of them from Bogotá, but TomPlanMyTrip mapped out the waypoints. All we had to do was connect the dots.

When we came back through Bogotá on the way from San José we did manage to visit the Emerald Museum and a photography exhibition that we’d missed the first time around. We also spent a day not leaving our hostel while dealing with The Sickness that was San José’s parting gift. After that, we hitched a night bus west over the mountains to the small city of Armenia (pausing in the wee hours of the morning because of a landslide further up the road) followed by a small commuter bus to the remote village of Salento.

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Salento

We arrived on Easter weekend – a huge holiday for Colombia – and afraid of being shut out, we’d booked our hostel well in advance: a primitive private room in a house at the bottom of a hill that also offered tent camping. Remote though Salento may be, we were told that after Cartagena it’s the second most touristed location in Colombia. I believe it after witnessing the crowds at the entrance to the Cocora Valley, but I can’t imagine why this particular nature site, as opposed to all the others in the country, draws so much attention.

Though mostly on private land, Cocora Valley is a refuge for the giant wax palm, a mountain-native palm tree that was threatened by logging and provides habitats for many animals, some endangered. To get to the valley, we hiked into town (uphill and downhill the whole way), bought a ticket on a vehicle known as a “Willy,” and off we went for a bouncy 9k ride. A Willy is a jeep with bench seats in the back, and the trucks won’t leave for the park until they’re full. In this case, “full” means two people plus the driver in the front, six or so in the back, and two or three hanging on for dear life while standing on the rear fender.

Lea and I rode up front.

And no, we still haven’t learned our lesson about climbing mountains. This hike was completely on our own, though, so we took it at our own pace. We stopped for water as often as needed, ate tuna sandwiches at the top of the hill, and generally enjoyed the experience without having to keep up with a cadre of twenty year old college students or a local guide who’d been genetically crossed with a mountain goat. Those people were all around us, but we stepped aside and let them pass.

The sheer amount of up-and-down in and around Salento limited our activities somewhat. It was a hike just to get from our hostel to the little corner store at the top of the driveway. We did crawl up to Salento’s “central plaza” at the top of the town, where I enjoyed a local dish called bandeja. This dish constitutes pretty much everything in the Colombian palette on a single plate.

On Easter Sunday, Lea and I mustered the energy to hike to the bus station to buy tickets for the first leg of our next passage. Then, we found an excellent Venezuelan restaurant (the closest we’ll get to that country on this trip, I’m afraid) and – just down the street – a tejo club that was open for business.

If you recall from my last update, or even if you don’t, tejo is a Colombian game that’s akin to cornhole with explosives. We practiced on an explosive-free court last week, but this was the real thing. In general, you throw metal weights at inclined ramps of mud about the size of a skee-ball target range. In the center of the mud is a metal ring, and along the edge of that ring are placed folded triangles of paper full of gunpowder.

If you hit the ring and set off a charge, that’s three points. If you get a bullseye in the center of the ring without setting off any charges, that’s six. If you blow a charge and stick the center, that’s nine points. If no one does any of these, then whoever sticks their landing closest to the ring earns a point. The winner is the first to 21.

We played two matches. I started off strong, but Lea beat me both times. One of the locals hanging out in the bar (because tejo clubs are also bars) decided to throw with us part of the time. If I’d scored him as well, he’d have beaten us handily. Having fulfilled our dreams of blowing stuff up, we settled down for an early morning and a long commute the next day.

Nature Trail To Hell

TomPlanMyTrip let us know that we’d have to do the jog from Salento to Jardín in three jaunts: Salento to Pereira, Pereira to Riosucio, Riosucio to Jardín. We were delighted on Sunday to learn that we could buy tickets straight through to Riosucio. We were less than thrilled to find out Monday morning that not enough people had bought those tickets, so our bus had been canceled. The company refunded our tickets, but that put us leaving Salento an hour later than planned and giving us about ten minutes in Pereira to grab our luggage, buy the next tickets, and make our connection. Luckily our next bus was ten minutes late, giving Lea enough time to buy us chicken and potatoes for breakfast.

The ride out of Salento had at least been comfortable, if short. The ride to Riosucio was crowded, bumpy, uncomfortable, and damp. The same could be said of the Riosucio bus terminal, a pitted parking lot at the back of the local futbol stadium. Riosucio, literally “dirty river,” did not look like a place we’d want to be stuck for the night. Luckily, we’d made it in ample time to catch the bus to Jardín. The problem was that no one would give us a straight answer as to when that bus was, whether it actually existed, nor would anyone sell tickets for it.

The first person we met as we got off the bus told us there was one for Jardín at 2:00. Someone else said 3:00. A minivan showed up around 2:20, but when we tried to board they insisted that it was already sold out. “How can it be sold out if we can’t buy tickets in advance?” was the question of the day – but apparently we could have bought tickets for this one had we been at the station a day before. A full size bus showed up before 3:00 and all the backpackers like ourselves piled on to claim seats.

My guess: the minibus is for locals. The larger bus that the tourists got to ride, so Lea tells me, was the “goat bus” that serviced the farms along the mountain route. Something Lea read online also implied that the earlier bus took a longer, but paved, road to Jardín. The goat bus did nothing of the sort. Instead we got to ride straight up the mountain, into the beautiful cloud forest, overlooking tremendous vistas of the Colombian Andes and absolutely terrifying drop-offs as we crawled along a single-lane road of dirt and mud.

The thing about cloud forests is that they’re damp. There were little waterfalls all along the road, as well as signs of recent mudslides and washouts. “Don’t look down,” was Lea’s advice that I wasn’t able to heed. For half of the time, our road was a shallow cut in the mountainside – this was safer, because if the bus leaned too far and rolled, the bank to either side would have caught it. At other points, I had to remind myself over and over that the driver did this all the time, knew the road, and how to handle an overlarge vehicle. Toward the end of the trip the bus actually hydroplaned on wet mud, but the driver caught it and managed not to kill us. For this, Lea and I tipped him very well when we finally reached Jardín.

Jardín

We staggered into Jardín at sunset and found our hostel after a little hunting. Jardín is a growing city: parts of it are still under construction and not on Google Maps. During our stay we ended up being the only guests in the hostel, meaning we had not only our refreshingly spacious room and bath to ourselves, but the entire common area as well. It was like being in a house again. After wandering downtown in search of an actual restaurant (the cafés outnumbered them 2-1) we settled in for a night of being thankful we were alive.

The next morning, upon seeing Jardín in daylight, I became even more confused as to why Salento is the tourist hotspot. Jardín is so much prettier. You can’t tell it from the first view coming down the mountain, but once in Jardín’s central district I was immediately struck by how colorful and vibrant the city is. It felt much like Mindo in Ecuador, but better developed. It’s not somewhere I could imagine settling down, but it would be a lovely place to hide from the world for a while.

Since 1) travel fatigue has been creeping in, 2) we’ve been devoting more and more time to planning our return home, and 3) we’re still in the goddamn Andes, we didn’t go out and do as much backpacker-hikey stuff as we would have in the early days of our trip. Nevertheless, we made time for two outings to enjoy the natural wonders of Jardín and not just the city itself. And since I mentioned Ecuador, one of those two excursions was to watch something that we’d heard much about in that country but never managed to see – the Cock of the Rock.

The Cock of the Rock, birds of the genus Rupicola according to Wikipedia, are endemic to Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. They live in the rainforests, nest in rocky areas (hence the name), and the males of the species are exceptionally flamboyant. Back in Mindo, there was a house where the owner had turned their backyard into a haven for hummingbirds. In Jardín, someone has done the same for the Cock of the Rock. The site is open for viewing in the early hours of dawn and late in the afternoon near sunset, when (especially during mating season) the birds go apeshit.

Our other trip was to visit La Cueva del Esplendor, a cave with a waterfall that plunges directly through the ceiling into a pool below. We read that some tours let you repel down, but I’m not sure that those are still running. We elected the hike. It’s possible to take a taxi and find your own way, but that involves several kilometers of unnecessary walking. We took a jeep tour (our first half-day excursion in ages that didn’t waste time going anywhere else!) that brought us all the way to the trailhead: a farm at the top of a mountain on another single-track mud road.

We’d been told the trek to the cave would involve a climb. On the ride I asked myself, “Where are we going to climb to, and how can there possibly be a waterfall, if we’re already at the top of the ridge?” The answer, dear readers, is that once we reached the top we got to climb back down through mud, stone, and water, to reach the cave. Halfway down it started pouring, forcing us to put on ponchos and making the slippery trail even worse than before. At last, knowing that we’d have to climb that muddy hike all the way back up and with the rain still coming, we reached the promised cave.

Here it is:

It was beautiful. Seriously, truly, jaw-droppingly beautiful. Also, despite the waterfall, it was dryer than outside thanks to the overhanging rocks. We came, we saw, we enjoyed. We left early to get a head start on the young family we were hiking with, who nevertheless caught up with us before we reached the top of the trail. All this made us once again wonder about the value of A) seeing awesome sights we would not otherwise be able to enjoy vs. b) going through hell and running water to do so. I think what’s kept us going through many of these adventures is that we’ve stubbornly maintained an overestimation of our physical abilities while at the same time signing up for hike after hike without really understanding the amount of exertion involved.

Tour companies always undersell the length and difficulty of any trekking involved on an excursion, and we’ve always envisioned the prize at the end and not the price of getting there. When traveling that’s a cost/benefit analysis that should always be in the back of your mind, but the temptation of all those pretty pictures on tour posters and Instagram, like sweets on display in a candy store window, seems to cancel out reason and doubt.

Still, I’ll say it again, once and for all this time – we’re done with mountains. It helps that we’re heading north toward the Caribbean, where mountains to climb are few and the beaches are much more enticing.

Next stop: Medellín – the city of El Patrón!

P.S. Lea’s Misty Mountain Macrophotography

P.P.S. Your Musical Send-Off

“Colombia might be the country that finally kills us.” – Lea Millet, April 14, 2019

Day Zero: In Which We Melt

We arrived in San José del Guaviare at an ungodly hour before sunrise on Flota La Macarena, by far the worst bus company we’ve used so far. After a blissful reprieve of cool weather in Bogotá, we were back in the steamy forests of northern South America. San José is a small town eight hours south by southeast from Bogotá, down from the Andes in the valley of the Rio Guaviare. Until three years ago, this region was infested with FARC guerrillas, but after a treaty with the government and the disarming of the rebels, nature tourism in the area has started to boom. San José isn’t strictly in the Amazon, but like Lençois in Brazil it’s as close as we’re going to come on this trip.

We were made aware of San José del Guaviare and the tour company Geotours by the blog Tom Plan My Trip, which is proving useful for finding other things to do in Colombia as well. After contacting Geotours, they sent us a selection of packages that included all housing and meals in addition to the daily excursions. Perhaps feeling a little over-ambitious, we opted for the four-day, three-night package. We made sure to arrive in town a day early, so as not to go directly from our night-bus to a grueling excursion. We had to arrange our own accommodations for that night, which wasn’t a problem; we’re old hands at that by now.

However. There wasn’t much available in San José that was both 1) in town and 2) in our budget, so we settled on a guest house that had a shared bathroom and (somehow I missed this) no air conditioning. “It’s only for one night,” we told ourselves.

Our room was on the second floor, right in the middle of the house. There was no window to the outside, but there was a window to the hallway. There was no ceiling, just an opening to the gables to let heat rise. There was a floor fan, which was the only thing that saved us from melting into human-shaped puddles of slag. We had to hang a mosquito net over the bed and refresh ourselves with bug spray every four hours while we were outside. We took turns napping so as not to set each other on fire. The shower was cold-water-only, which was a blessing. We spent almost all of our time sitting on the porch, petting the cat, and listening to a local work crew directly across the street feed trees into a wood-chipper.

That night, between dinner and bed, we went to buy water. We’ve done this everywhere in South America. From Ecuador to Bolivia, it wasn’t even safe to use tapwater to rinse toothbrushes. It’s been better since, but we’ve never trusted the local tap for drinking or other uses, such as in my CPAP. Usually we buy a five or six gallon jug, which is much more cost-effective than spending the big bucks on individual bottles. Imagine our surprise when we discovered that in San José they don’t sell water in jugs. They sell it in bags.

Now, I imagine this makes perfect environmental sense. After all, a flattened bag takes up a lot less room in a landfill than a big, round container. However, as we would discover the following day, the bagged water they sell in San José tastes exactly like insect repellent.

Day One: The Shape of Things to Come

We dragged ourselves out from under our mosquito net so we could hurriedly pack and be picked up by Geotours. After dropping our luggage at our new hotel (with its promised A/C) and a breakfast of soup and various sides, we were off on a bumpy road to our first day of travel around Guaviare!

A word about the region: modern civilization ends the instant you leave San José. Pavement, plumbing,  and electrical service don’t extend into the countryside. Most of our hikes would begin and end at farms in the campo which double as tourist waypoints. As I said, the tourism industry is still taking off in San José. In many places it hasn’t cleared the launch pad.

Our first outing was a hike to a rock formation called the Portal of Orion. It’s an impressive stone arch set among many other geological outcroppings. Once Lea outed herself as a geologist, our fellow tourists were very much interested in hearing her explanations of what we were seeing as well as those offered by our guide.

The hike was strenuous. It was several kilometers in and out, level for some stretches. In other places there was much climbing over boulders and jumping over narrow gaps. Two dogs from the farm/tourist center followed the entire way. As with the best of nature walks, the beauty of the surroundings compensated for the exertion and stiff muscles.

Not so much for the second hike, which in my notes for this post I dubbed “The Pointless Death March to Nowhere.” This was actually a combination of two hiking trails – the first up and down many steep inclines to reach a rocky, mossy overhang that was not vale la pena of getting there. Once we crawled out of that narrow defile, we passed a “do not go beyond this point” sign onto a much easier nature trail. This one had signs highlighting the local flora, and all the signs were pointing in the opposite direction from which we were walking. This trail eventually brought us to a different farm where we enjoyed lunch, panela-flavored lemon water, and hammocks while a torrential downpour moved through the area.

Here we also changed into our swimsuits. Our final outing would be a swim in Laguna Negra (that’s Black Lagoon for those playing at home). It would take a boat ride to get there which would, for me, become the most harrowing part of the day.

The boats used in this region are extremely long, narrow, flat bottomed canoes with shockingly shallow drafts. So shallow that once we were in the boat, the surface of the creek was no more than an inch from the lip of the boat. One sway too far in either direction could easily have tipped us, or so it seemed.

But first, we watched the boatman bring our canoe’s motor out of the shack where he kept it and hook it up to our worthy vessel. Then we had to climb down a freshly slippery bank to reach it. I was the first after our guide and I wiped out, jamming my shoulder on a root. It wasn’t a bad injury but it did put my left arm out of commission for a day or so. After we wobbled on board, we sped down a twisty channel through mist and rain, surrounded by a multitude of wonderful South American birds that we couldn’t really photograph thanks to the weather and the lousy light.

The channel opened into a wide lake, and we swam. However, there’s no reason we couldn’t have done the same at our hotel’s swimming pool – the Laguna Negra was no more impressive than any swamp hole along the U.S. Gulf Coast. Once the swim was over, we took a slightly less nerve-wracking ride back to the truck, followed by a bumpy road to our hotel and its marvelous cold shower.

Oh yeah, the shower. The shower at our first hostel was nothing but a bit of PVC pipe sticking out of the wall with a single knob to turn it on or off. (Hot water? Who are you kidding?) When we saw the exact same setup in our touristy hotel room we realized that, like bagged water, this was probably a standard set-up for the area.

Day Two: A Few Good Moments and a Lot of Wasted Time

The second day did not get off to an auspicious start. We rose very early for a 6:00 a.m. ride back into the wild to eat breakfast and spend several hours at a tiny coca farm. In this case the farm wasn’t a departure for a hike to some point of interest, it was the point of interest. And it wasn’t very interesting, not when we couldn’t follow a word of the farmer’s heavily accented Spanish, nor did we really care all that much about agronomy. Even after the farm tour was done, it felt like we sat around for at least an hour doing nothing but taking pictures of animals and wasting precious daylight as it got hotter and hotter.

Next, once it was truly scorching, came the hike. We drove to another farm and walked a long, long cow path to Cerro Azul. We’d asked our guide in advance about the difficulty of this hike, and he told us that its first stop was the most important. It would become more difficult after that, but there would be no problem if we decided to turn around.

That first stop was halfway up the mountain to view an huge wall of rock covered in ancient pictograms. There was little we could understand from the local guide who lectured on what is known of the culture who painted them, but they were stunning to behold. Just as in the Cueva de las Manos in Argentina, these pictograms have been exposed to the elements for untold thousands of years and still hold their vibrancy and color. Unlike those in Argentina, these presented a wide variety of images, shapes, animals, and figures.

This day we were with a much larger tour group, most of whom had purchased a single day trip instead of a multi-day package. There were several who elected to return to the farm with Lea and I instead of climbing the rest of the way up the mountain. Those who went on reported seeing several more areas of pictograms, a cave with bats, and the view from the top of the mountain. It also turned out that those of us who returned early made the right decision, since we weren’t the ones caught in another torrential downpour on our way back.

The day ended on another high note. After lunch in a nearby small town we made for a local bar where those of us who were so inclined had the chance to try our hands at the Colombian game of tejo. Lea and I have been wanting to try this, and while this was hardly a regulation tejo field it gave us the chance to get the feel of it.

Tejo is like a Colombian version of “cornhole,” except that instead of throwing beanbags at a hole in an angled plank of wood, you’re throwing rocks at a circular ring set on an inclined bed of clay. In a true tejo club, the target ring is lined with gunpowder charges, so that if you hit the mark it explodes. The tejo targets we were using did not explode, but there’s still no better way to spend forty minutes throwing rocks at things short of participating in a riot.

Day Three: River Dolphins and a World of “Nope”

This day started with another 6:00 a.m. pick-up. This time our guide led us four blocks from our hotel to a dock where we boarded a boat for a trip down the Rio Guaviare.

I had high hopes. This was the day that had sold me on the idea of coming into San José in the first place. This day we would get the chance to see and swim with the “pink” river dolphins of the Guaviare. In the end, this day would be a massive disappointment.

At least the boat was a real boat this time, and not a canoe. We sped east along the Rio Guaviare for at least an hour and a half until we slowed into a side channel. There we pulled up to the bank next to the farm where we would eat breakfast. There was no dock from which to disembark and this boat wasn’t designed to let people climb out the front, so we got from the vessel to dry land by stepping off the side into another of those unstable, flat-bottomed canoes and walking along its length to shore.

After breakfast, we walked what must have been another two miles to the camp/chicken farm that was the setting-off point for the dolphin encounter. We learned that at other times that walk wouldn’t have been necessary, but that the river was too low for our motorboat to reach this far along the creek. From this point we sat around for a while, drank more lemon water, were given lifejackets, and walked the next two miles through shade and scorching sun to meet the dolphins.

Once again, we learned the error of expectations. I’d imagined that this swim would be like before, both at Laguna Negra and on the other tours we’ve taken where swimming was an option – namely that we’d walk into the water from the shore.

Nope. Here, they expected us to climb into another of those damned canoes, ride it into the middle of the lake/river/whatever, and jump in over the side of the boat. After the swim, we were then expected to somehow climb back into the canoe without tipping it. While I’m sure that wasn’t impossible for all the twenty-somethings we were touring with, neither Lea nor I felt comfortable attempting such a feat. So instead, we sat in the boat and watched.

In truth, there wasn’t much to see. The dolphins showed up, moved on, and showed up again, but they barely did more than break the surface. They were nearly impossible to photograph, because you never knew when or where they would appear. When they did, all you would see was a curve of back and a blowhole for the briefest of moments. They aren’t really pink – just grey with pink splotches – but we knew that going in. What we didn’t know was how miserable the whole experience of baking in the sun while a whole lot of nothing went on around us would be.

All this was made worse by the fact that just before we walked down to the canoe, one of the guides stopped us from applying sunscreen. Apparently we weren’t supposed to, but no one had made that clear. In fact, our other guide had told us to apply sun lotion and bug spray when we specifically asked him about it the day before. Anyway, I got sufficient lotion on Lea’s back but was stopped before she could get the front of her shoulders or chest. I didn’t get any except on my arms, legs, and neck where I’d applied earlier in the day.

After an hour of sitting in the boat, the guides had mercy and allowed us to return to shore. From there, Lea and I hiked on our own back to the camp/chicken farm instead of waiting around for the others, who would catch up with us half an hour later. We had lunch, then lazed around for two pointless hours before moving on.

This is important. Had we not wasted so much time at lunch, we would have returned to the riverboat before the deluge started. As it was, it poured on us during the hike back to farm #1. Lea and I had ponchos, so no worries there. The rain stopped for a while as we loaded ourselves on board and returned to the mighty river.

Then the heavens opened up again. We dropped the canvas flaps that hung from the boat’s roof to keep mostly dry inside, but our pilot had close to zero visibility. His windshield wiper was useless. He kept wiping condensation out of the inside of the windshield and sticking his head out the side to check our position against the bank. This didn’t stop him from barreling ahead at full speed, winding around sand banks and fallen trees.

It was here that Lea uttered the quote I used at the head of the article. Intellectually we realized (or rather, hoped) that the pilot was familiar enough with the river that we weren’t in as much danger as it seemed. But it seemed like a lot.

The fact that I’m writing this means that we did escape with our lives. However, after a day of baking, burning, hiking more than necessary, and getting soaked, we decided we’d had enough. There was one more day of excursions ahead of us, but we decided to cancel. After three days of sore bodies, bug bites, and wasted time, we let the tour operators know that we couldn’t handle any more. There was even a “native cultural ceremony” we were supposed to attend that night, but we just couldn’t bear to leave the hotel.

Day Four: In Which We Cut Our Losses

I know it sounds like I’m giving Geotours a bad rap, and I really don’t want to. If you’re young, in good shape, and speak Spanish fluently enough that you can follow country dialects, they provide a great opportunity to experience the sights and native culture available in this remote part of Colombia that is only now being discovered by the wider world. If you sign up for one of their multi-day packages, they really do take good care of you, providing a hotel and three square meals a day. They’ll even get you to and from the airport or bus station.

If you’re like us, I’d recommend doing what some of our fellow travelers did – arrange your own lodgings, then pick and choose which excursions to go on, giving yourself time to recover in between.

On our last day in San José, we stayed in our air-conditioned room until our 1:00 p.m. check-out, then had lunch at a nice restaurant and wandered the town, spending time in the city park and one of the many, many pool halls that populate the city. When it was clear another deluge was on its way, we went back to our hotel lobby, petted the hotel cat, and waited for our last dinner and late-night ride back to Bogotá.

We may have made this resolution before, but from here on it’s firm: no more guided tours unless absolutely necessary. We’d rather find places to go that we can get to on our own and take at our own pace. We’d like the option to quit while we’re ahead and to go somewhere else once we’ve experienced as much of a location as we care to. Guided tours let you reach places that you probably wouldn’t have otherwise, but they also trap you into their own program. That’s a degree of autonomy that, at this point, Lea and I don’t want to give up anymore.

Looking ahead, we’ll have self-guided hikes, days on the beach, hopefully more snorkeling, and time set aside for prepping our return to the States. As of this writing, we’ve got one month left in South America. I’ll let you know how that feels once I figure it out for myself.

Don’t get attached to plans. That’s what I said this time last year (mas o menos) when we landed in Guatemala City to find that Avianca had canceled our flight to Flores. In that instance it was because “the plane needed parts,” to which our reply was, “No problem. You get those parts. We can wait.”

This time we expected to fly Avianca direct from Salvador, Brazil to Bogotá, Colombia. What we weren’t aware of, until Lea didn’t receive an email reminding us to check in, was that Avianca Brazil had gone bankrupt. Our plan had been to spend our last day in Brazil lounging at our hotel’s poolside bar until late afternoon. When we discovered that our flight may no longer exist, we decided to get to the airport now.

Sure enough, our flight had been canceled twenty days prior and we hadn’t been notified. The frazzled Avianca employees (who someone told us hadn’t been paid in a month) did everything they could to get us and another couple in the same predicament to our destination as quickly as possible.

After an hour of searching their own flights and those of other airlines, the wonderful Avianca attendant came up with a way to get us into Bogotá a mere fourteen hours after our original scheduled landing – but we had to get on a plane that very minute. She ran us through the security express line and before you could say “obrigado” we were flying south to São Paulo, a city we’d completely bypassed on our way through the country. Once there we rushed to catch a flight farther south to Porto Alegre, our very first port of call in Brazil. The whole time, a voice in the back of my head was screaming, “We’re going the wrong way!” It was as if all our hard work traveling north through Brazil had been undone in a single afternoon.

But wait. There’s more!

To their credit, in addition to finding new flights, Avianca put us up at the airport Ibis Hotel in Porto Alegre, where we arrived in ample time to get dinner and go to bed early. Our alarm was at 02:30, breakfast at 04:00, then off we were on the 04:30 shuttle for a cross-continental flight to (drum roll please) Lima, Peru!

We never meant to go back to Porto Alegre. We especially never meant to go back to Lima. Ever. Our return to Peru wasn’t long, though – just enough to go back through security and grab duty-free chocolate before the last leg of our journey, landing us in Bogotá at 2:00 in the afternoon. We came west two time zones, but that’s still four flights in under 24 hours for those keeping score. Here’s a map of our original flight plan and the route we actually took:

Despite the unexpected hassle, I’d still like to thank the kind employees at Avianca who kept their cool and worked this out for us during what must have been the latest in a series of very bad days.

So We’re in Bogotá – Now What?

Our itinerary for Colombia was vague to the point of nonexistence. People online had told us that Bogotá was nothing special. Having spent a few days there ourselves, Lea and I would disagree. Granted it’s not the prettiest of cities, but we got sick of “colonial architecture” a long time ago. There are still plenty of things in and around Bogotá to do. In fact, we’re going to pass back through Bogotá and spend two more days, giving us a chance to visit a few places we missed the first time ‘round.

So what is there? Museums aplenty, a big produce market, and a long pedestrian walkway through the downtown business district thronging with street vendors. There’s a Hooters for cryin’ out loud. There is also Monserrate, a mountain that looms over the city with a church on top. There’s no climbing this one unless you’re crazy, so we rode the funicular up (the teleférico is out of service at this time). Once we established the lack of oxygen at the top of the mountain (and since we still hadn’t adjusted to being back in the Andes) we took a few pictures and came right back down.

Bogotá’s transportation system isn’t the most fun to navigate. Like other big cities in South America you have to have a metro card which you load with money – that’s no problem in Bogotá. The public transport here is only buses, but there are some bus lines that act as a de facto subway system, running in dedicated lanes down the middle of the city’s larger freeways and only accessible via subway-style stations in the center of the road.

The problem with the transit system is much like it was in Quito, where despite the presence of buses everywhere, there are some places they simply don’t go. To make things worse, one of these places is the main inter-city bus terminal that connects Bogotá to the rest of the country.

Let me say that again: The city buses do not stop anywhere near the city’s main bus terminal. The closest you can hope to get without taking a taxi or Uber is a ten minute walk away.

Back to the Salt Mines

One of the most enticing attractions we came across while going through information on the Bogotá area (and something that fell into the ever-important category of “we haven’t seen this before”) was the Salt Cathedral in Zipaquirá, an elaborate underground church in an old salt mine. Before going, though, we discovered from another travel blog that there was a better, less touristed salt mine experience in the town of Nemocón twenty minutes farther down the road. This blog indicated that Zipaquirá was overrun with tourists, and to get there you had to travel all the way to Bogotá’s Terminal Norte, whereas you could get a direct bus to Nemocón from Terminal Salitre in the center of town.

Here’s the problem with old blog articles. Things change, they go out of date, and sooner or later everything they say becomes wrong. For instance, there is no longer a direct bus line from Salitre to Nemocón. We picked up the bus to Zipaquirá, which took nearly two hours just to get out of Bogotá because it stopped every two blocks to pick up more passengers. (It would have been faster if we’d taken the city bus system to Terminal Norte to begin with.) Once we got to Zipaquirá we quickly found a bus to Nemocón and the salt mine, and while it wasn’t overrun it has certainly been built up to handle a larger tourist crowd.

The salt mine was still impressive. The tiny chapel inside, not so much – the statuary wasn’t carved out of salt, it had simply been brought in from outside and placed in a vaguely chapel-shaped chamber. The tour also made a big deal of the fact that this was where the Antonio Banderas movie The 33 was filmed. Part of the set was still in place, which was cool I guess. However, the most impressive features of the mine were the perfectly reflective brine pools. These pools of saline water are only a few inches deep, yet they are such incredible natural mirrors that they make the mine’s chambers appear twice as grand as they actually are.

Getting back to Bogotá was another adventure. There is no bus station in Nemocón, so we walked halfway across the little town, asking directions as we went, until we finally found a bus stop. We didn’t wait too long for one that advertised “Zipa” in its front window, but because of roadwork and rush hour, what had been a twenty minute trip on the way out became forty minutes on the way back. Once in Zipaquirá we quickly found a bus heading back to Bogotá, but we probably should have waited for the next one as it felt like the driver had been snorting cocaine. He drove like an absolute madman, flooring the accelerator, slamming the brakes, continuously honking at and tailgating cars in front of him as if he was going to run them over.

None of this madness helped us get to Bogotá any faster, of course, due to a half hour of backups on the edge of town. When the bus arrived at Terminal Norte we were all “LET US OFF NOW.” From there we were took the more sane, though no less crowded, city bus the rest of the way. What we’d thought would be a half-day excursion had turned into a full-day, exhausting slog. Nevertheless, we were still enjoying Bogotá. We had one day left before riding the night bus south into the wild. We didn’t expect that last day to be as exciting as it turned out.

Crime Fighting!

After dropping our luggage at the bus station, we still had plenty of daylight left to visit museums in the Candelaria district. We’d been told this area was sketchy at night. We found that the same holds true during the day. The only museum we made it to was the Museo del Oro, with its mind-blowing collection of gold artifacts and handiwork. There were others in the area, such as the Emerald Museum and a photography exhibition, but before checking those out we set off down the main pedestrian street in search of hot dogs.

And that’s when it happened.

I was waiting at an intersection when something hot and wet splashed all the way down my right arm. Confused, I turned to see what had happened when an old lady rushed up and started pawing at my sleeve, babbling in Spanish, and pointing upward at something – an umbrella, a tree, a bird that might have crapped on me. Whatever it was, I tried to tell the lady I was all right when my left front pocket, where I keep my cell phone, suddenly felt very much lighter. I turned around and caught a glimpse of a man, probably in his late thirties, hiding my phone under a bit of newspaper as he walked away.

I shouted, ripped the paper out of his hands, grabbed my phone, and punched the bastard (rather weakly) in the middle of his back. The guy did the smart thing and kept walking. Lea, who’d been several yards away, realized what was going on and started shouting “thief” in Spanish, but the two of them had vanished.

It was a classic distract-and-grab ploy. The old lady splashed me with either warm milk or soapy water, then made sure my attention was firmly on her while her partner came in from the other side and picked my pocket. I’d like to attribute the recovery of my phone to my lightning-fast reflexes and acute situational awareness, but really I think the thief was simply off his game, waiting too long after the original distraction by the old woman. If he’d moved in quicker while I was still utterly confused he would have made off with my phone with no problem. Instead he gave me time to realize that something was out of place.

I won’t lie. I wish I’d punched the guy harder and somewhere more vital. However, I’m sure that cops would have shown up at that point and I’d be writing this entry from the American embassy while waiting on a flight back to the States. As it was, Lea and I released the emotional tension by walking away and finding a fast food joint where I could enjoy that hot dog I’d been after to begin with.

Now if you read this and come away with the feeling that Bogotá or South America in general is a dangerous place, I think you’re jumping the gun. Consider: we’ve been in South America since August 1, 2018 – that’s nine months and counting – and this is the first instance in all that time that someone tried to rob us. Also consider: at no point was I ever in danger. The worst that would have happened was that I’d have lost a phone. If they’d have gone for my wallet, I’d have lost my Georgia driver’s license, a fake credit card (a Visa gift card with $0 balance), my health insurance card (I can always print another) and about $100 USD in Colombian pesos.

I’m not happy it happened, but I’m glad it worked out the way it did. We’ll go back to see those museums that we missed – and I’m not going to worry about it. I will be a little more paranoid about my belongings, but that’s better than giving up on enjoying myself.

As for danger, let me tell you about a boat ride down the Rio Guaviare. That post will be coming sooner than you think!