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