Author: Jared

Wow. It’s hard to believe we’re really here. I’m hoping The Amazing Race’s Phil Keoghan is there to greet us at the airport with a list of how many miles and countries we’ve covered circumnavigating this continent.

Seriously, how can this possibly be over? This is our life! This is what we do, for better or worse. We jump on a bus, we get to a new city, we learn our way around, we plan some hikes, look for museums, book an excursion or two. We wake up at 5:00 or 7:00 or 9:00 depending on the schedule. We scrape together meals from whatever’s available at the nearest grocery that’s compatible with our hostel kitchen – or go out for the cheapest local cuisine we can find. Or hot dogs.

Our week in Cartagena has been a week of “lasts,” not unlike the month before we left Atlanta. We passed through our last municipal bus terminal. We checked into our last reservation on Booking.com. We built a mental map of our local area for the last time. We’ve been using some of our travel gear (and clothing) for the last time, throwing things away as we go. As I’m typing this, Lea has announced that she’s taking her last “vacation nap.” Yesterday it struck me that I was withdrawing money from a South American ATM for the last time.

As much as I’ve been looking forward to returning to the land of sausage biscuits, potable water, and central air – I’m sad for the trip to be ending. I could use another week in Cartagena.

Knowing that this city would be our port of departure, we’ve done things a little differently than elsewhere. For once, we’ve splurged on our accommodations. Instead of booking an inexpensive hostel in a slightly sketchy part of town, we rented a big, two-bedroom apartment in ritzy Bocagrande, a narrow peninsula of high-rises and beach resorts that juts out west of the Old City into the Caribbean. Our apartment is on the 19^th floor of the Edificio Poseidon del Caribe, with a balcony overlooking the ocean. Here’s the view:

Instead of cramming ourselves into a space the size of a walk-in closet with no storage, at last we have room to spread out. In addition to craving comfort and some actual vacation before returning to the States, we rented a larger place because we were expecting company. Our first night in Cartagena was actually our last night alone. For months our friend Melissa has been planning to join us, and at almost the last minute our friend KT opted to ditch Florida and fly down too. Our two-bedroom apartment has now become the party suite!

It’s good that they came to join us, because if they hadn’t we wouldn’t have left the building. We’re both worn out from all this travel, but having guests with energy and excitement and enthusiasm about being in South America has given us the renewed motivation we needed to get out and explore our surroundings for a little while longer.

Last Excursions

Lea and I are sticking to our “no more guided tours” pledge. However, one change we’ve made in Cartagena is to give up on the local bus network and use taxis. On our way to the airport to pick up Melissa and KT, we happened onto a friendly driver from Medellín whose Spanish Lea can understand. We’ve had bad luck with cabbies in the past and generally don’t trust them farther than we can tow their vehicles, but Daniel was willing to wait for us at the airport until our friends arrived and seemed like a genuinely cool cat, so we hired him to be our driver for the week, at least for all of our longer trips. This has worked out wonderfully.

The first excursion was a street art tour of Cartagena’s Old Town. This one I had to miss due to one last attempt by South America to demolish my gastrointestinal tract. My roomies had a great time, however, and returned with some really neat photographs. Street art is something Lea and I have seen plenty of, but to enjoy it with friends who are seeing it with fresh eyes brings a certain level of “wow” back to the experience. Even though I didn’t go, I loved seeing all the photos they took.

The next day we rented a boat. This was by far the best way to enjoy the beaches and islands along the coast. We could have taken a packaged tour and been herded like aquatic sheep from one tourist trap to the next, wasting who knows how much time fending off beach vendors and sweltering at overpriced restaurants.

Instead we had at our disposal at 32 foot motorboat with a Skipper, a Gilligan, a cooler for snacks and beverages, and an itinerary that we could alter at whim. The plan was to swim offshore in the Rosario Islands, visit a popular party beach, then go to the more secluded Playa Azul. We decided we weren’t interested in the partying and that we’d brought sufficient snacks, water, and alcohol without having to stop and buy more, so we got our friendly drivers to take us from one beautiful swimming hole to the next.

Though not on the itinerary, they also showed us Pablo Escobar’s 300-room island vacation home and one of his drug planes that was shot down and sunk just offshore from his villa.

We ended up returning earlier than planned due to weather, but it was still a full day and much more relaxing than any packaged island tour would have been.

It was also Lea’s birthday, which all of us forgot until after our trip. Luckily we were able to locate an outstanding tapas restaurant called La Tapería, and after two pitchers of sangria all was right with the world.

The next day we went back to the Old City to enjoy a few more of its sights. First on the list was Parque Centenario, which is inhabited by a variety of monkeys, birds, fiery red squirrels, and supposedly sloths. It took a long time to find a sloth and she was so well hidden as to not be very photogenic (see last week’s post for better sloth pics) but the park’s other inhabitants were more than happy to pose for us.

We followed this up with pizza in the Plaza San Domingo and a visit to the Palace of the Inquisition. Only the fist floor of that museum is dedicated to the Inquisition itself, while the rest is given to the history of Cartagena in general. Amidst the dioramas of indigenous persecution and displays of “Enlightenment” era torture devices was, without any fanfare, a display case of banned, heretical books – including a copy of Nicolas Copernicus’s On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres.

My brain exploded. “They’ve got a Copernicus!” I told everyone who could hear. I don’t think anyone else was quite as excited, but to those even slightly into astronomy, this is a sacred text. It’s like stumbling on a Gutenberg Bible, Shakespeare’s First Folio, or issue #1 of Action Comics in the corner of an unassuming history museum where most people’s eyes would glaze right by without understanding how transformational an object they were looking at.

Anyway, I’ll calm down. But holy crap – I think I was just as excited to see a copy of this book as I was to see the Magellanic Clouds for the first time way back in Chile.

The following day we continued our “DIY excursion” program by hiring Daniel to drive us to the Mar Rosado (Pink Sea) – a brightly colored brine pool that’s much more accessible than those near Salar de Uyuni (only without the flamingos) and the Totumo Mud Volcano. For a fee you can walk up to the summit of the volcano and, if you’re into making questionable life choices, you can lower yourself into the mud. KT and Melissa did so. Lea and I were happy to watch.

Our evening ended with Daniel taking us to one of his favorite restaurants. We’d asked him for a place that served cazuela de frijoles and bandera paisa like they do in southern Colombia. He provided the perfect spot and even joined us for our meal. I’m telling you – if you find yourself in Cartagena, forget all the tourist agencies and look this guy up. You won’t find a better cabbie in all of South America. In my mind, he’s redeemed his profession and I’m not nearly so reluctant to get into a taxi as I’ve been for many a year.

Today, as I write this, is our last full day in South America. (By the time you read this we’ll already be home, or at least on the way.) We’ve had laundry done for the last time, and Lea and I made our last trip to buy stamps and mail postcards. We’ve gone to the beach for the last time (which we also did on the first full day KT and Melissa were with us) and drank a little too much for the last time on this continent.

A brief word on the beaches in Bocagrande – the sand is perfect, the water is clear, warm, and beautiful, and the vendors outnumber the tourists two-to-one. As long as you’re sitting down, you’ll be telling a salesman “no, gracias” about every thirty seconds. They sell sunglasses, hats, temporary tattoos, sets of dominoes (?) and anything else you might imagine. If anyone had come by selling high-pressure water guns I would have bought one just to use it as a pop-up blocker on all the other vendedores. It’s much less stressful, we discovered, to go on a weekday late in the afternoon than on the weekend. Both times, we did give money to vendors selling cocktails, fruit salad, and homemade coconut candy. After all, those are essentials.

And so.

Here we are.

We’ve done what we set out to do. We quit our jobs, we broke our American brainwashing, and we’ve traveled eight countries in nine months, two weeks, and three days. We swam with giant sea turtles. We hiked in cloud forests. We saw whales. We explored ancient ruins. We dipped our toes in the world’s largest swimming pool. We ventured as far south as it’s possible to go without swimming to Antarctica. We stood in the icy breeze coming off one of the world’s last advancing glaciers. We’ve seen street art where the paint was still fresh and rock art left by inhabitants before the invention of the written word. We soaked in the spray from one of the world’s greatest waterfalls. We made our way through a country where neither of us could speak the language. We’ve ridden dirt roads over mountains and seen more wildlife than anywhere else except the Serengeti.

We’ve ridden day buses, night buses, and goat buses. We’ve traveled by plane, train, gondola, riverboat, and 4×4. We’ve visited rainforests, salt flats, mountains, valleys, deserts, beaches, and jungles (both natural and urban). We’ve done more mental currency calculations in one year than in our entire lives before. We’ve dined well and eaten cheap. We’ve slept without heat or air conditioning, taken cold showers, gone without a roof over our heads for more nights than I can count (buses don’t qualify), and learned in the process what we truly need to be happy in life and what privileges we’ve enjoyed in the past should not be taken for granted.

There have been times when I couldn’t wait to come home. And now I just want one week more.

Signing off from South America…

…but The Escape Hatch will ever be open.

Jared Millet, Cartagena de Indias, 16 May 2019.

P.S. Our route through Colombia:

After leaving Medellín, with its shopping malls, metro lines, restaurants, and air conditioning, we literally fell off the map – that map, of course, being the continent of South America. Our destination: Isla Fuerte, one of many small Caribbean islands off the Colombian coast. Our goal was to cut ourselves off from the world, enjoy some beach time with literally nothing else to do, and perhaps see some interesting wildlife. The latter was why we chose Isla Fuerte over the other Caribbean options. This island, in addition to its ubiquitous chickens, donkeys, and beer-drinking humans, is home to a colony of sloths – creatures second only to housecats in the easy, lazy examples they set for the rest of us.

But before the words “tropical paradise” enter your head, let me disabuse you of that notion. Four days on Isla Fuerte was more of a “tropical endurance test.” Life on the island is primitive to say the least and because we weren’t there during tourist season, 90% of all businesses on the island were closed, including the hostel at which we’d booked a room. Nowhere is there air conditioning, and the daytime highs and the nighttime lows were both around 90°F. The plumbing is based solely, we believe, on rainwater collected in rooftop cisterns, and the whole region is currently in a crushing drought. The amount of potable drinking water on the island was dwarfed by the quantity of beer.

And from day one it became clear that yes indeed, we were in the Caribbean, where tourists are viewed by many – to use Lea’s expression – as “walking ATMs.” The general level of trust we’d built up that the people of South America would help out and point us in the right direction was eroded from the moment we left the mainland.

Our route was a night bus from Medellín to the little town of Lorica. From there, we took a ride to the coastal village of Paso Nuevo via tuk-tuk. The tuk-tuk, top-heavy with our luggage on the roof and not quite stable with only three wheels for a pot-holed forty kilometer journey, was quite the adrenaline rush to wake us up from our long, sleepy ride.

We asked the driver to take us to the dock for the boats going to Isla Fuerte, which he did – sort of. It turns out he didn’t bring us to the main public dock, but instead to a private launch where the owners offered an “express” ferry to the island for a mere $60,000 COP ($18 USD) each. The other option they offered was to wait for more passengers, which would bring it down to $40,000 each. We were tired and ready to get to our hostel, so we elected for the higher price. The crew then proceeded to load our backpacks, along with a shipment of long wooden poles, and we were on our way.

We found out later that the public ferry is $15,000 per person. We got tricked into paying four times that much and subsidized someone’s lumber shipment as part of the bargain. Upon making landfall – and I should also note that there are no piers on either end, so you walk into the surf to get on and off the ferry – there were plenty of people offering to “help” us find our hotel. “No thanks,” we said, “we’ve got it from here.”

The place that we’d booked was on the edge of Puerto Limon, the island’s tiny village. We’d downloaded several maps, none of which even agreed on the island’s general outline. Google Maps was most accurate on that score, but its approximation of the “streets” in Puerto Limon was nothing close to reality. In truth, Isla Fuerte has no streets – just footpaths, donkey trails, and a handful of paved sidewalks. The island is so small that it doesn’t need anything else.

We found our hostel only to be told by the lady whom we presumed to be the manager that we couldn’t stay there. It was either too hot in the building or there were electrical problems – we were never clear – but she dragged us back across town to the parrot-infested Hotel Puerto Limon, right where we’d originally disembarked, and handed us over to the staff there. We could have argued but we were tired, they had a room with a private bath, and it was slightly cheaper than our original reservation anyway (though they tried to argue it up later). Besides, with no Internet or phone signal we had no way to research other options. It seems that in the off season, there are only three or four hotels that remain open anyway.

Let me describe our room. It opened onto a balcony that overlooked an almond tree and the Caribbean. It had a private bath and shower, with a curtain to separate the toilet from the rest of the room no less! There was a large garbage can in the shower that was filled with water to the top. This is what we’d have to use to wash ourselves and flush the toilet for the next four days.

The room had glass-paned windows, but we’re not sure why. Above them were openings directly to the outside, so there was no keeping bugs out. There was no glass in one of the panes on the balcony door, so even though you could lock it, anyone could reach in from outside and open it up. There was a fan over the bed, and they brought us a second one. These only served to make the heat barely tolerable, and only if all the doors were open as well. There was a breeze that flowed down the hotel’s central hallway and would have cooled the room effectively, except that every night someone fired up a generator in a building behind the hotel, sending noxious fumes straight through the hall.

There was ample room to hang our mosquito net, thank goodness, but the bed was a solid slab of concrete and our pillows were like sacks of potatoes straight from Peru. The power went out every night for at least an hour, but reliably came back in time for dinner.

As for meals, an ecohostal called “La Playita” is the only place on the island with a dependable kitchen and bar, so we became regulars despite not staying at their hotel. Our own served breakfast, lunch, and dinner, but we had to let them know in advance if we wanted to eat. At first we weren’t the only guests, but we were by the time we left.

In essence, after spending nine months circumnavigating the continent, we saved the hardest, most “roughing it” hotel stay for nearly the very last.

So was it all bad? Absolutely not. By day Isla Fuerte is beautiful, and if you have the wherewithal to hike to any other part of the island, there are cool tropical breezes that make life infinitely more pleasant than in the sheltered, scorching port town. On our first full day we set out in search of Playa San Diego, the island’s most popular beach and reportedly a good place to spot the fabled sloths. We couldn’t find the sloths despite much searching, but we did enjoy a cool, windy beach with thatched umbrellas for shade and a lunch shack where a kind old woman sold water and beer.

That afternoon we tracked down Rafa, owner of Cabañas Lili and much of the island’s tour business, and booked a snorkeling trip for the following day. At $50,000 COP for the two of us, it turned out to be a bargain. We went to four snorkel sites around the island, some with interesting coral, some with fish, and two with ferocious currents. We landed back at San Diego for beer and water from the same nice abuela as the day before, and we got one of our guides to show us where the damn sloths were. Once they were pointed out to us, it was a forehead-slapping moment. We had almost certainly looked right at them and simply mistaken them for termite nests or something. They blend right into the trees and, if you don’t spot their faces or claws, look like nothing but big gray balls of fur.

That afternoon that we went to La Playita for adult beverages (I hate beer) and that evening we went back for dinner. Afterward, daily visits became routine. La Playita is owned by a jovial, talkative Australian, and we got to hang out with fellow backpackers from Germany and France who were working their way through the country.

On our last day, our mission was to head back to San Diego with my telephoto lens and catch us some sloths (photographically speaking). This we did, both on the way to the beach and later when we left. There were adults, adolescents, and one tiny baby crawling all over his mother and surely being a pest. At the beach, abuela pulled out chairs for us and we spent hours going back and forth from the cool, relaxing waves to the shade of a crooked tree.

We got up very early for the 6:00 a.m. boat to shore. The attendant only tried to scam us a little – asking for $20,000 each before we told him we knew it was only $15,000. After that, we taxied back to Lorica and bused an hour up the road to the seaside town of Tolú, a place so quiet that its motto ought to be “Nothing to see here, move along.” It has a seaside malecón with jetties, wandering vendors, restaurants, and juice bars – some of which are actually open. We’ve gone out a couple of times, but mostly this is a stop to tuck ourselves in and recover from the heatstroke of the island before taking on the challenge of our next, and last, big city.

I’m writing this from the Hotel Pizzeria Opera Tolú, which has air conditioning and a pleasant cold shower (words I never thought I’d use). I rarely mention the names of the places we stay, but I want to say this one again: Hotel Pizzeria Opera Tolú. When I saw that there was a hotel that was also a pizza joint, that it was only $16 USD per night, and that it had a 9.4 rating on Booking.com, I told Lea “I think I’ve found the place.”

From here we’re off to Cartagena de Indias, where we’ll meet up with some friends who’ll stay with us for the rest of our trip. We’ve booked a two-bedroom apartment in the Bocagrande district overlooking the sea. It’s been a long road and there’s only a little left. It’s hard to believe that our lives are about to change again, and in just as big a way as they did when we started this trip. I’ll write about that wave when we surf it. Until then, here’s to one more week of adventure, beach snacks, high-quality rum, and (gods willing) relaxation.

Here we go.

P.S. Love In the Time of Cholera

For my novel-per-country project, I just had to go with Gabriel García Márquez. In this, his second most famous book after One Hundred Years of Solitude, he charts a love triangle that lasts for well over fifty years, mainly because the spurned romantic at the heart of the story is an obsessive maniac who refuses to give up on his first crush. It’s set in Caribbean Colombia during a time when the interior was still an inaccessible wilderness and the country was starting to open it up to the wider world. I wasn’t sure I’d enjoy this book that much after the first chapter, but I think I’ve gotten used to the pacing and flow of South American literary epics. My full review is here on Goodreads. I can’t help but notice that Lea only gave it one star. I gave it five. Maybe this country has charmed me more than I thought.

P.P.S. Snorkeling Pics!

Colombia is the eighth country we’ve visited and it feels like we’re not giving it the attention it deserves. We’re certainly not as gung-ho as we were so, so long ago in Ecuador. But also it’s the case that our attention is divided. Part of it’s still focused on exploring and enjoying this country, but the rest is aimed at our return to the U.S. We finally signed an apartment lease that we’ve been negotiating for a month. I set up our electric service and renters’ insurance while Lea had a video interview for a job. From a continent away we’ve rented a car to go get our cat, picked movers to empty our storage unit, and generally started the dirty work of merging ourselves back into the American grind. Some things we’re ready for (hot running water for one) and others we’re not (alarm clocks and commutes).

Lea observed that in my last post I used some form of the phrase “settling down” at least four times, and that my subconscious was probably telling me something. Given that I felt only half-awake when I wrote that article, it’s entirely possible.

Another funny thing about Colombia is that after nine months of hard travel and on-the-fly problem solving, this country feels like a final exam. Bogotá tested our skills at arranging transport, since unlike elsewhere on the continent many of Colombia’s bus companies have no presence on the internet. San José del Guaviare, Salento, and Jardín tested our fortitude for long, tiring treks, as well as our flexibility in knowing when to go it alone or even call it quits. Medellín has echoed the bank problems of Argentina (ATMs that worked elsewhere suddenly don’t here) and the navigation problems of Peru (none of the bus schedules on Moovit or Google Maps are up to date). Medellín does have the advantage of an excellent metro system that includes both cable cars and trains, but not all the stops are listed online.

As a result, my first impression of Medellín after the peaceful simplicity of Jardín was that it was a tangled, confusing mess. The hostel I booked for our first three days was on the south end of town in a district full of high-rise hotels, gigantic malls, mediocre fast food, and spaghetti junctions galore. Where we got off the train, even the overpasses had overpasses. The pedestrian walks snaked between, over, and around them and made wayfinding a little bit difficult.

So our first excursion in Medellín was to get the hell out of town. Had we been as full of pep as we were back in the Galápagos we probably would have taken the bus to Guatapé and climbed this big, stupid hill:

We have learned our lesson regarding climbing mountains, and we did no such thing. Instead we took the bus to El Carmen de Viboral, the capitol of Colombia’s pottery industry – a city where the buildings and sidewalks are tiled with ceramic plates. To my pleasant surprise, the ride to El Carmen was deeply relaxing. The road wasn’t bumpy, the driver wasn’t crazy, the breeze through the windows was refreshing. I’ve learned to dread most forms of transportation, so it was almost intoxicating to arrive in El Carmen in a pleasant, unhurried state of mind. The town itself was vibrant without being overwhelming, and its unique style of decoration made it beautiful in a way we hadn’t seen before.

After three days in a part of Medellín with little personality and too much American chintz, we moved north to the Laureles-Estadio neighborhood and Medellín started to grow on us. This part of town has much more character, and feels trendy and Colombian at the same time. We’re an easy walk from a giant supermarket, but even closer to a heavily trafficked avenue full of street vendors, hot dogs and fried chicken stalls, bicyclers and pedestrians. Colombians, who are very friendly, seem much less reserved than their cousins in Ecuador and Bolivia. Strolling down the street is to pass through waves of conversation, laughter, and horrible sing-a-longs to music in bars. The noise can be too much, but Colombians behave like people who live with gusto.

After moving our belongings, we at last set out to explore the city. We visited the Museo de Antioquia in the heart of downtown, and on the way discovered the true Medellín – full of fruit sellers, family outings, vendors hawking everything you could want under the elevated train tracks, a procession of what I’d swear were Hare Krishnas, and people dancing in the street. The latter we saw twice: elderly couples were dancing in the Parque Berrio to the accompaniment of a four-piece guitar and washboard band, while a mob of young people danced along to loudspeakers in a plaza beneath the metro stop nearest our hostel.

The Museo de Antioquia features art both contemporary and traditional, but its main highlight is a large collection of the work of Fernando Botero, who donated the pieces himself. “Large” is the appropriate adjective, because most of his works are huge, as are the people depicted in them. The top floor of the museum is dedicated to his paintings, and the park just outside features Botero’s jaw-dropping bronze sculptures.

Our second outing was to Medellín’s botanical garden, which is free to enter and one of the best we’ve seen in South America. While unfortunately the orchid house was under renovation, we were still able to enjoy the rest of the park. Most surprising were the giant striped iguanas that roam at will and seem to provide most of the garden’s lawn maintenance.

And finally, we got up early in the morning to join a walking tour of Comuna 13, the district of Medellín made famous to Americans by the TV series Narcos. Even after the era of Escobar, Comuna 13 was still one of the most dangerous places in all of South America, the site of bloody violence between leftist militias and right-wing paramilitary groups.

The Comuna 13 of today is a lively, flourishing neighborhood. The government has invested much into turning the area around, building schools and funding infrastructure projects. It’s still a maze of alleys, twisting streets, and steep climbs, but there are now pedestrian escalators connecting the upper reaches of the district to the rest of the city below, as well as funneling tourists and their pesos to the community’s artists, restaurants, and coffee sellers. The street art in the district acknowledges the area’s dark past, but with a bright and hopeful look toward the future.

One week in Medellín has hardly been enough time to know the city, especially as distracted as we’ve been by other concerns. Nevertheless, part of this journey has been to find places outside the United States where we would seriously consider living someday. While we don’t think we’d retire to Medellín, it’s a lively, thriving place where we could easily imagine spending a lot more time, should the opportunity present itself.

After all, they’re dancing in the street.

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.