Ciudad Perdida (Lost City)

The steps up to the city

Andy and I had been waiting the whole trip for the five day hike to the Ciudad Perdida and the anticipation was becoming especially unbearable as we got closer and closer to the date when our yellow fever vaccinations that we had gotten in Tunja would become effective.  We weren’t really sure what to expect from this trek in general and part of me was ready to get going just so that it would be over with sooner.  We had heard it called the ‘Green Hell’ referring to the oppressive heat, humidity, and rain of the jungle and we had seen multiple different people walking around town with an entire arm or leg covered in overlapping angry red bumps from mosquitoes and sand flies (or no-see-ums).  The day our vaccinations kicked in we walked into Magic Tours in Taganga plopped down 420.000 pesos apiece ($228 USD) and we were booked into a five-day tour starting the following day.

Cooling off

Taking the advice of some travelers we had talked to we left the majority of our stuff in the baggage check at our hostel to set out with our packs as light as possible, and a couple of trash bags apiece to hopefully protect our little amount of stuff from the drenching downpours that occur.  We were soon on our way, packed into a modified Landcruser with twelve other people who we quickly got to know after chatting for the first hour of the ride and being thrown violently against each other for the last hour.  I’m not sure that any other vehicle (besides the motorcycles that kept passing us) could have made up that road; we were fording streams and driving through potholes that looked like meteor craters.  One of the men in the truck told us that the government officials in Bogotá think that this road is actually paved and well maintained with the money given to the local officials each year, who are actually pocketing it and letting the mud track slowly erode.

When we finally got to the town at the start of the trail we were divided into our two hiking groups.  Andy and I found ourselves with one other hiker, a British guy also named Andy, and our guide, Pedro, while the other five foreigners were sent away with their guides, a father and son team who are both called Caesar.

Sleeping area

After a quick lunch we started out along the trail in the early afternoon heat.  The entire trail is only about 30 miles long, but I could tell immediately that this was going to be much harder than any 30 mile hike I’d ever done in Oregon.  Hiking uphill in a humidity that is so strong it causes you to have streams of sweat pouring down your face almost immediately is not an easy feat, especially if you’re paranoid about bugs like me and choose to wear pants the entire trek.  Thankfully the guides are used to having tourists moving at a sweaty zombie pace and take plenty of stops for fresh fruit and river swimming.  In a couple of more hours we had made it to our sleeping area for the night, a large covered area with a hundred hammocks, three showers, five toilets, and only us four people sleeping in it.

How to make cocaine

The next morning we woke up and hiked into the woods for a little demonstration from a local entrepreneur on how to make cocaine.  It turns out that to make cocaine all you basically need besides the coca is only eight or so house hold chemicals.  Who knew?  It was interesting to hear about what the man giving the demonstration had to say about how everyone who was now working in the tourism industry up there used to be involved with the drug trade in various different ways.  He may not have been completely truthful about everyone being on the straight and narrow though; Pedro said there were still a lot of drugs growing in the hills.

At about this point in the trek we realized that the powdered juice we were constantly drinking was made with water straight from the river.  So much for our iodine pills, because there was no way I was going to turn down the sweet sweet taste of Kool-Aid after Pedro got us hooked on it.  We passed by an indigenous village on the way to camp and although we weren’t allowed in it was still interesting to learn a little about their lifestyle.

Indigenous buildings

At camp we met up with the group we had ridden with to the trail head and played cards with each other for a few hours to pass the time.  Things really got interesting when a couple of Gol bars (chocolate flavoring covering wafer cookies, caramel, and nuts) were thrown in as prizes to the person who could make the best animal noises.  One of the other Americans took the grand prize by whimpering like a dog and nuzzling the older, very stoic, Caesar.  I think he even chewed his arm a little.

Crossing one of the many rivers

The next morning we started out earlier than the other group and were followed by a stray dog who had been flip flopping between our group and the other where he had gotten the name No Piña because of his dislike of pineapple.  About half an hour into the hike we crossed a river in a box hanging from a cable.  When all of us humans were safely across No Piña wasn’t really sure what to do.  He had been offered a ride in the box by British Andy and refused (if dogs can do that) so the only thing he could do was try to swim across.  We watched from the far side of the river as No Piña swam against the current and slowly got sucked down the river over rocks and through a rapid.  We were all pretty depressed thinking that we were watching a dog drown and were extremely relieved to see him pop up on the opposite bank after a few tense moments.

We arrived early in camp at eleven and when the other group caught up with us we got scolded for losing No Piña.  With a whole day to kill there wasn’t much to do but play a marathon five hour game of President and A-Hole and do a little swimming in the most amazing swim hole of the trip.  It was in the middle of the river in an eddy behind a rock beneath a waterfall.   Later in the afternoon it started to rain so hard that we could visibly notice the river rising.

The Lost City

The fourth day was the day we’d all been waiting for.  We woke at five-thirty and climbed up the 1200 steps to the Lost City which was actually discovered relatively recently, in 1972, by treasure hunters who were able to steal a lot of gold figurines before the authorities got involved.  Pedro led us around to all of the platforms which were held together by rocks and covered in grass and looked very much like the terraces you see people using for farming.  And as he described the huts that used to be built on them I started to day dream that I was a Colombian treasure hunter stumbling upon the remains for the first time.  The coolest part about being on the ruins was that there where only eight foreigners and our three Colombian guides exploring the area, unless you count the military of course.  We were quite out numbered by the military which is a good thing since they were originally stationed there after eight foreigners were kidnapped by the guerrilla group ELN and held hostage for three months in 2003.  The area felt quite safe to us now, but it was still a little eerie when Pedro pointed out the trail that the ELN had used to march the tourists away to their hiding place.

Break time

There were a crazy amount of mosquitoes at the city and I was happy when the time came to leave.  We had just barely set foot outside of the ruins when Pedro stopped short and told us all to stop walking because there was a deadly poisonous snake on the path.  He dropped a rock onto it which managed to cut it into two wriggling pieces.  Caesar had to grab another large rock to smash the moving head and fangs completely flat.  It was exciting and also very scary to think of how close we were to such a deadly jungle creature- the guides told us there was no antidote to this snake’s bite, and even if there were would we be able to get the anti-venom in time so far away from medical treatment?

Dampness

We walked at a much quicker pace covering ground all the way back to where we slept on night two, the whole time Pedro was telling me stories about the worst things that have happened on his guided trips.  One story he told me was of a boy getting bit by a snake at the same place where we camped on night three.  Pedro was sent running up the stone steps to the Ciudad Perdida to get the anti-venom from the military.  When he was told that the military didn’t have it for whatever reason he turned around and ran back to camp to relay the information to the boy’s father, who also happened to be an indigenous leader.  Luckily the leader was able to go into the woods and make some kind of herbal poultice which cured the bite and the next day the boy was fine.

After a few more stories of heart attacks, snakes, and an unconscious Israeli, we spent an hour or so jumping off rocks into the river where we almost saw the demise of No Piña. That night everyone was so too exhausted to play cards and we were happy to pass out under our mosquito nets.

Cooking dinner

The fifth day was another one started at five thirty in the morning and by noon we had covered the distance of both day one and two combined.  After one last lunch together we all squished back into the vehicle again and we were soon back in Taganga.

The military

Overall this trek was one of the most fun things that Andy and I have done in Colombia.  At times it was really difficult because of the heat and humidity, but anyone in halfway decent physical shape shouldn’t have a problem completing it.  For me the breaks from hiking that we took swimming in the river with fresh fruit cut and laid onto a banana leaf for us to eat were just as fun and amazing as the actual Ciudad Perdida itself.  We managed to survive the trip with minimal bug bites, unlike a couple of our companions, by constantly wearing pants and obsessively covering ourselves in bug goop.  I would highly recommend this trip to anyone who has enough time on their Colombian holiday, and don’t forget to bring some playing cards.

Santa Marta

Our arrival into Santa Marta was the first time that either Andy or myself had ever set eyes on the Carribean Sea.  The weather was really windy and a little stormy so it wasn’t the typical blue-green color that we’ve seen since, but nothing could have dampened our excitement to be on a tropical coast.

Just about everyone we talked to either didn’t bother at all to stop in Santa Marta or really didn’t like it if they did.  We decided to give it a chance anyway.  The weather was unbearably hot in the heart of the city so we spent a lot of time on the waterfront boardwalk which had a consistantly strong winds blowing throughout the day.  We visited the small free museum that had a replica of the Ciudad Perdida to get us excited for our upcoming trek, and I´ll admit it, to enjoy the air conditioning.  We also spent a day on the beaches of Rodadero which seemed a little dirty but still pretty.  The highlight of our stay was walking along the water at night watching families and couples strolling back and forth under the stars.

Santa Marta

Sometimes when Andy and I are traveling along the ‘Hostal Trail’ we start to crave cities that don’t rely solely on tourism and Santa Marta is definitely just that.  We got to eat a lot of street food and walked a little bit around the market.  It was more so the hotel we were in than the town itself that finally got us moving out of the city.  Our hotel was really cheap craphole and we got used to holding our breath when we left it to walk down a six block stretch of road where the sewer was flooded.  But when I woke up one morning and saw that some weird-looking mold had grown on the soap dish overnight it made sense to leave before  an alien spore started inhabiting my body.

San Gil

Parque Gallineral

San Gil turned out to be one of our favorite places in Colombia, which was a bit of surprise.  When you look it up in the various guidebooks, all they talk about are all the Adventure Activities available in the area- rafting, caving, paragliding, etc…  Thats great, but we didn’t come all the way to Colombia to go rafting and such- we’ve got plenty of that back in Oregon.  So when guidebooks excitedly mention Adventure Activities and not much else, I roll my eyes and don’t expect too much.  thankfully that turned out to be wrong.

Juan Curi waterfall

San Gil is lower in elevation than many of the other places we’d been, so it was nice and warm but not too hot- nearly a perfect climate.  It’s a smallish city that felt very safe, with a lot of younger people from the local university giving it a fun sense of energy.  There’s a square with a nice church, some nice buildings around, whatever… I can see why the guidebooks don’t say much about San Gil itself, there just isn’t much in the way of traditional tourist sites.  What it does have is tons of friendly people living their lives in a nice town, without a lot of tourists around.  The market had fruit stalls that made monstrous and delicious fruit salads, and the fruit ladies were super nice and showed us some new fruits and joked around with us.  Also in the market we bought a lunch with some of the best tasting beef we’ve ever had, smoked over an open fire before grilling, it had the flavor of beef jerky but the texture and juiciness of flank steak.

Delicious fruit salad with cheese and coconut

The plaza was always buzzing with people, but weekend nights it was packed with folks just out drinking beers and hanging out, vendors strolling around selling stuff, music, people watching… travel experiences don’t get much better than being right in the middle of all that, eating delicious meat on a stick barbecued right in front of us by our meat lady- oh yeah, we were regulars there long enough to have a meat lady. There was a bar on the corner where we bought a small bottle of rum for just a bit more than it cost in a liquor store, and drank rum and cokes for a few hours while we played cards and people watched, listening to the good Colombian music.

Meat Lady

During the days we were in town we’d walk around, looking for nice cheap restaurants and things to see.  There’s a park at the edge of town filled with giant tropical trees and a giant swimming pool, but unfortunately the pool was dry while we were there.  And remember earlier, when I snobbishly dismissed those so-called Adventure Activities?  Well, we were only kidding ourselves, we love that stuff!  So we signed up for rafting the Rio Suarez, a class IV plus run that people rave about, but unfortunately the river was too high while we were in town, and no trips were able to go due to safety concerns.

Parapente

High rivers have absolutely no effect on the sky, though, so we decided to try parapente: Spanish for paragliding!  For about $40 each we were picked up at our hostel, driven to a local hilltop, and strapped in front of a paragliding pilot.  It happened just about that fast, there was no preamble or safety talk, the language barrier was probably too big anyway.  Run, said someone  in a heavy accent, and a few steps later we were airborne and rising fast.  My pilot was a bit of daredevil, which I was mostly OK with at least once I was back on the ground.  After catching some updrafts to get us way up in sky, he put us in a powerful spin plummeting back to

Tobacco field

earth.  The canopy was actually below us as we spun, the G forces pushing me back into my harness like nothing I’ve ever felt.  It seemed to go on a long time, and when we finally pulled out of it my pilot was literally screaming with excitement.  I pushed my eyeballs back in and agreed with him, si, muy fuerte. In all we were up for about 20 minutes, a fun ride that made me much more nervous than I’d expected.  Denae went after me and had a more conservative pilot and a tamer ride, she was disappointed.  It was windy and landing was tricky; she ended up coming down in the hillside tobacco field but everybody was OK.

Barrichara

Another day we took a local bus 30 minutes to Barichara, another beautifully preserved colonial town along the lines of Villa de Leyva, but smaller and less touristy.  It was a beautiful and quiet place, and we had lunch and wandered the streets for a while.  Up one of the roads in town we found the trail we’d heard about, a section of an old camino real that’s been used for hundreds of years.  We followed the stone path down along the rim of a large canyon, through some beautiful country, walking for about 1.5 hours before we came to the very small town of Guane.  We were very hot by this time, so when we bought a beer and sat in the shade until a bus showed up to take us back to San Gil.

Barrichara

Another day we caught a local bus to Las Cascadas, about 20 minutes out of San Gil, and walked the short trail up to the Juan Curi waterfall.  It was a big falls that we could step under at the outskirts for a very forceful shower, and the best part was the pool right at the base.  It was a great swimming pool, if a little chilly, and we had tons of fun swimming and lounging around at this beautiful spot.

Villa de Leyva

Villa de Leyva is a scenic old colonial town a few hours outside Bogota.  Most of the buildings are painted white, the streets in the center of town are cobblestone (and yet there were still bike cops, bumping around slowly and uncomfortably), and it´s easy to imagine yourself having slipped back in time a few hundred years.  Except, those beautiful colonial buildings now house ritzy boutique shops and upscale restaurants and the town is full of rich Bogotans out for a long weekend wearing designer sunglasses.

There wasn’t a lot to do in town other than wander around and enjoy the architecture, which really is impressive- this is one of the best preserved places we’ve ever seen.  We enjoyed our stay; it was relaxing and pretty, we caught up on some reading.  I checked Wikipedia for reminders of what to write about, and learned that the town has a ¨variety of exquisite gastronomical pleasures¨ for which it is known.  But the restaurants mostly looked too expensive for us and we had pizza every night.

Kronosaurus

Back in some prehistoric age Villa de Leyva was part of a huge inland sea, and there are tons of fossils left over from that era.  The most impressive is creatively known as ¨El Fosíl¨ and is a nearly complete skeleton of a Kronosaurus located a short taxi ride out of town.  The Kronosaurus was big, maybe 20 feet long, with an alarming percentage of its length devoted to its giant head.  It looked like a demonic hybrid of dolphin and alligator, and was really cool to see.

While we were in town they were shooting scenes for what I´m pretty sure (thanks to the aforementioned Wikipedia) was a Zorro themed soap opera in the very pretty central plaza.  We had fun drinking coffee and watching the action.  We spent four days in town and it was a bit more than plenty, but we enjoyed Villa de Leyva.  On our way out we stopped in the nearby town of Tunja at the Red Cross office and purchased a couple Yellow Fever vaccinations, which we wanted to have for the coast, for about $30 each.  Not bad, at home they would have been at least $150.

Filming the soap opera

Medellin

There´s a park in Medellin where Fernando Botero (Colombia´s most famous artist) installed a large sculpture of a dove, called the ¨Bird of Peace.¨  In 1996 guerrillas blew it up, killing a number of people.  Botero asked that the damaged sculpture be left as it was, only inscribed with the names of those killed.  Alongside it he built a new sculpture, identical to the first before the bombing.  It´s Botero´s powerfully elegant demonstration of the futility of violence.

Botero's sculptures

In the same park, we somehow got roped into drinking beers at about eleven AM with a group of younger local guys.  One guy showed us his bullet scars and bragged to me about his hundred dollar dual time zone watch (zone two was Rome).  It was fun and seemed vaguely safe, but when they started snorting coke we bought a round of beers, gave away our best pen, and pretty much ran away.

Medellin is a big city with a lot of energy and a feeling of resurgence.  It sits in a narrowish valley bordered by tall hills, and the uniformly brick colored skyscrapers give it a unique and attractive look.  Not that long ago Pablo Escobar basically ran the place and it was supposedly the most dangerous city in the world.  Now it draws in quite a few backpackers and expats and business interests, and is pretty safe as long as you don´t wander into a barrio where you have no business being.  It´s still the type of place where, when walking just a few blocks downtown toward a well known park, we accidentally went down a street filled with hookers and scary looking guys giving us less than friendly stares.  And then a block away we were in a park filled with frolicking children.

Medellin  has a very efficient and high quality elevated metro, and a couple cable car lines for commuting to and from the convoluted and poor hillside neigborhoods.  There´s even a new extension of the cable car line that takes you way up and over the hills on the side of the city, into a nature reserve that feels like a whole other world.

It rained a lot during our visit so we checked out a couple museums for something dry to do.  One of them was filled with young security guards that apparently thought we were international art theives; each time we entered a new room they would almost sprint to a vantage point where they could stare intently at our every move.  Did you know that it´s difficult to appreciate paintings while a teenager is preparing to tackle you from ten feet away if they see any funny business?  After a while I started messing with them, hurrying to another room and hiding behind a pillar while they looked frantically around.

Gambling seems popular in Colombia.  Most cities we´ve been to have lots of little casinos sprinkled around, and Medellin is no exception.  We haven´t been enticed by any of the casinos, but did definitely catch the gambling spirit one afternoon in Parque Bolivar.  A crowd of people were gathered and when we went over to see what was happening we were greeted by an unusual sight: guinea pigs.  A guy had three of the little rodents, and they were trained to stay in one spot until instructed otherwise.  About thirty feet away he arranged a dozen plastic salad bowls with little doors cut into them; put upside down on the ground they made little homes that appear to be irrisistible to guinea pigs.  People then put 200 pesos (about 12 cents) on the bowl of their choice, and at the man´s signal the pigs ran towards the bowls.  The bowl that the last pig chose was the winner, and the gambler received 1000 pesos, enough for a soda.  We tried it and won!  If things go really wrong, at least we know we can head to Medellin and hustle the guinea pig races.

Bandeja Paisa

Salento

Arabica coffee, the good stuff, grows well under certain conditions: it needs to be in the tropics, at a particular altitude range, in volcanic soil, and in a place that has quite a bit of rain. One of the world’s more perfect confluences of these factors can be found in Colombia’s zona cafetera, or coffee zone. This is the birthplace of Juan Valdez (his parents, though, are a marketing association), where the majority of the country’s most important legal cash crop is grown, and quickly exported to other countries.

Coffee beans on the tree

Coffee country is a green place. It rains a lot here, and that combined with the fertile soil and equatorial sun makes plant life go a little bit nuts. Coffee is far from the only thing that thrives, and the brilliant, almost fluorescent shades of green in the countryside are astounding. Sprinkle in some enthusiastically colored flowers, rivers flowing through lush valleys, and mountains rising up into the clouds, and you’ll have a rough idea of what this place is like.

Dried un-roasted coffee beans

The term “coffee zone” refers to a big area of the country, so we decided to focus our explorations around the small country town of Salento. It’s popular with both foreign and Colombian tourists, and on the weekend the place was buzzing. The main street especially felt quite touristy and was filled with expensive boutique shops, and we saw lots of cosmopolitan-looking Colombians wearing recently purchased wool serapes and cowboy hats over their designer jeans; we decided it was this country’s equivalent of an “I Heart NY” tee shirt. On weekdays though Salento reverted back to the sleepy little town that we’d been expecting, and we had fun walking around the town square and the back streets, buying empanadas and various sweet treats and saying hi (buenas!) to everybody.

Wandering around the coffee plantation

Most of the Colombian food we’ve seen so far is relatively bland. It’s not at all spicy like Mexican food, and really not that varied either: for those of us on a budget the defining meal is something called a “comida corriente,” which is a set meal consisting of soup, then a plate filled with rice, beans, a veggie mixture, fried plantains, fried bready things, and some kind of meat or fish, which is also often fried. The deep fryer is a very important culinary tool here. Anyway there are lots of variations on this meal, but it’s usually basically the same thing. Most people eat it for lunch and it’s a big plate of food, designed to be the main meal of the day. In Salento we were very happy to find a little place called Rincon de Lucy, where they did an especially good comida corriente for just over $3, with local trout an option for the meat dish. It was really good food, still a comida corriente but done extremely well. We ate there every day.

Hot chocolate eaten the typical way with a huge chunk of cheese...yum!

We stayed at a popular hostel called the Plantation House, owned by a British expat named Tim. It was a pretty place with a very basic room for an OK price, but what we really enjoyed was Tim’s tour of his newly purchased working coffee farm just down the street. He calls it Don Eduardos, and he leads people on really fascinating tours of the place, giving us a nice overview of how coffee is grown. Here’s a condensed version of what he told us:

There are two main kinds of coffee plants, Robusta and Arabica. Robusta has more caffeine, can be grown more places more easily, and doesn’t taste as good. Arabica beans make a much better cup of coffee, and is the only kind of coffee grown in Colombia. There are many different species of Arabica coffee, originating from all over the world, and most of them traditionally need shade to thrive. Unsurprisingly, in the last couple decades people have been messing around with coffee plants in laboratories, making hybrid varieties that are in some ways better. These so-called “modern varieties” produce more coffee, can be grown closer together (also producing more coffee for a given area), and don’t require shade. They also need much more fertilizer, and it is generally agreed that they don’t taste as good. Apparently the general quality of Colombian coffee has declined over the years coinciding with the large scale switch to these modern varieties.

Valle de Cocora

In Colombia coffee beans are graded by size alone; big beans sell for more money. The majority of the coffee picked is sold to distributors where it is mixed together and graded solely by bean size, with no regard given to whether it is a traditional or modern variety, or an unusually good tasting or average species. It’s a strange system, especially since no one claims that bigger beans taste any better. It also obviously encourages the cultivation of the prolific but sub-par modern varieties of coffee.

Valle de Cocora

Coffee plants will grow to be trees if they’re allowed, but it makes the coffee difficult to pick so they’re generally kept to the size of a large shrub. The plants produce red or yellow berries, each of which contains two seeds- coffee beans. We chewed on some berries and they tasted vaguely sweet, due to a sugar content that is removed by a process called washing. The coffee beans are removed from the berries by running them through a separator machine, and then the beans are soaked in water until it starts to ferment, removing the sugar content which can otherwise leave undesirable flavors. The water is drained and the beans are sun dried.

Valle de Cocora

When the coffee is washed some of the beans will float to the surface; these are inferior beans and are marked for domestic consumption. Traveling in Colombia we’ve been surprised to find that the coffee isn’t usually that great; that’s because most of the good stuff is set aside for export- it’s an important cash crop.

Valle de Cocora

We chewed on some of Tim’s dried beans, and they had no taste; just hard plant matter. They were light green in color, and most coffee is exported in that state because it will last almost a year before degrading. From there two thin husks still need to be removed, and then the beans are roasted. Its a surprisingly basic but apparently easy to screw up process: just keep the beans moving while they’re being heated. You can do it on a stovetop, but large scale operations use rotating drums inside ovens. The longer you roast the beans, the darker they get. Dark roasts are stronger tasting and more bitter, and also have less caffeine. Colombian coffee is traditionally roasted lightly. Those roasted beans are what you buy at the grocery store.

Sorry if all that put you to sleep, but we found it fascinating to see and learn about it in person. Don Eduardo’s coffee farm was 7 hectares of steeply sloped hills filled with coffee, pineapple, banana, berries, giant bamboo, and flowers. It was absolutely gorgeous and had fantastic views of the valley below, and a stream with several waterfalls running through it. Tim bought the place two years ago for $50,000 usd. He’s got some interesting business ideas involving selling boutique strains of coffee direct to people overseas. We spent a couple hours walking around the place in a drenching rain, eating bananas off the trees and looking around, trying not to go sliding down the hillsides.

Valle de Cocora

Another morning we piled into an old Willy’s Jeep with seven other people to drive about half an hour to the Valle de Cocora, a famous valley filled with Colombia’s national tree, the wax palm. It’s an unusual palm tree, very slender and much taller than normal palms, and they’re all over the place in this area. The brilliant greens of the grasses and other plants, combined with the wispy wax palms, and soft artist’s light filtering through mist, make for a very otherworldly feeling to the place, and it’s indescribably beautiful. We took some decent photos, but they don’t come close to doing it justice. From the valley floor we followed a well worn path up and up into the cloud forest, eventually reaching a nature preserve headquarters where an older couple who live here as caretakers fed us hot chocolate and cheese.

Our last night in town we wandered over to the local tejo court. Tejo is a game along the same lines as horseshoes, but approximately 100 times as fun. You throw a conical metal weight at a target area of about four by four feet, propped up at a 45 degree angle and filled with clay. In the center of the clay are little paper triangles filled with gunpowder, and if you hit them they explode. Loudly and with a big flash. Even when we expected the explosions, they were loud enough that we still jumped about a foot in the air. Points are earned in a variety of ways and you play to thirty, but really it’s about the explosions. And did I mention that tejo court time is free? You just pay for the beers that you’re required to drink while you play. Open a tejo court in any college town in the US, and avoid getting sued, and you will shortly be rich. It’s truly the finest game we know of.

Getting rained on in the Valle de Cocora

San Agustin

The Archaeological Park

From Bogota we took a night bus south ten hours to San Agustin, a town which apparently hasn’t really been particularly safe to visit until the last several years. Our bus was a modern luxury coach and very comfortable, and we were further comforted (at least that was the idea) by the experience of having an employee videotape everyone’s face at the beginning of the ride so the cops could have a visual record if something happened.

The river Magdelena

Thankfully everything went fine, and we found San Agustin to be a nice little town set amongst some absolutely stunning countryside. The vegetation seemed to be mostly of the temperate-jungle type, and we saw all kinds of new plants and flowers. This area is famous for some very early indigenous ruins and statues from a culture that no one knows much about, so on our first day in town we walked out to the town archaeological park where several sites are grouped together. Most of what we saw were large flat boulders with fierce looking figures carved onto one or two sides of the rock. They were mostly human figures, with some birds and jaguars thrown in. Overall we found them interesting; not of the same caliber of some of the other indigenous sites we’ve seen, but definitely worthwhile.

The Archaeological Park

More exciting to us was the lush countryside that was all around, which we got to see much more of the following day when we set out on a horseback tour. Our guide was a nice young guy from town, and he lead us on a circuit of some of the other nearby sites. Again the artifacts were kind of secondary; they didn’t seem much different from what we’d seen the day before. Riding the horses was great fun though, and we went to some amazing viewpoints and past lots of small working farms. It felt a bit like riding into a past century, and I found myself daydreaming about living on a quiet little finca in the tropics, working the land… but then I remembered I’m allergic to weeding. We bought some guarapa, a fermented sugar-cane juice, from a little shack along the way and shared the bottle while sitting at one of the ruins, looking out at the hillsides and river canyon below us. That guarapa was pretty good stuff; about the strength of wine and barely over a dollar for 1.5 liters. We thought it was tasty. It was a great afternoon; muy tranquilo.

Our trusty steeds

Our last day we spent wandering around town, enjoying the relaxed atmosphere and eating some good food. We were kind of sad to be leaving; our hotel was a nice place with a little balcony off our room, and a courtyard filled with hammock chairs and plants- all for just over $10 a night. I especially enjoyed having one of the resident parrots sit on my shoulder and chew on my hair, and there was even an old turtle wandering around the floors. We were headed for Colombia’s famous coffee region though, so it wasn’t that hard to book another night bus out of town.

Rolling green hills

View from our room at Hospedaje el Jardin

Bogota

Well, here we are in Colombia. The country full of cocaine and guerrillas, dengue fever and kidnappings, or at least that’s what everyone thinks.

Simon Bolivar Plaza

Our first stop is Bogota, the capital of Colombia and quite a large city at just under seven million. We weren’t sure what to expect in Bogota as far as safety is concerned. When even the government recommends that you carry only a days worth of cash, no cards and only a copy of your passport, you start to wonder. So, we locked our valuables in the hotel safe before heading out on an exploratory walk around the central colonial part of town, known as Candelaria. The more time we spent wandering around the safer we

Chicha

started to feel. The streets were crowded with students from the nearby university and we quickly decided that what we needed after our restless night on the plane was a typical Colombian lunch called a comida corriente. This staple meal of the locals involves a meat based soup with a grain in it and maybe potatoes, followed by your choice of meat with rice and beans or vegetable mush, fried plantains, and a juice made from one of Colombia’s many mysterious exotic fruits. After a quick siesta we managed to find our way into a tiny bar where we tried chicha, an alcoholic beverage made from fermented maize. They served it to us in a large gourd with two straws, and the experience was completed by the blaring loud sounds of a Colombian Led Zeppelin cover band coming from the bar’s TV. We ended the night by eating tamales and arepas and walking through some sort of street festival taking place one of the main streets that had been closed to traffic.

Catedral de Sal

The next day we went with some people from our hostel to the nearby town of Zipaquira, which has a big tourist attraction called the salt cathedral. It’s a huge salt mine that they’ve carved giant chambers out of and filled with crosses and other church related items carved out of salt rock. It’s actually a pretty impressive place and fun to wander around in. The biggest chamber is a working church, holding mass on Sundays and filled with pews and whatnot. At the end of our tour we watched the inexplicably 3-D movie in which a time traveling robot showed us the geological and modern history of the place.

Ciclovia

Bogota actually seems to be a fairly progressive city, and has an annual day where cars are banned to encourage citizens to try public transport and commute on bike. Bicycles are big here, and the highlight of our stay was the Sunday morning Bogota phenomenon known as Ciclovia. It’s an open invitation to the city’s bikers, joggers and other self-propelled types to come cruise up and down one of the city’s main north-south roads, which they close off to traffic. Along the way they set up free bike mechanics, food vendors, and even cooling misters that seem rather unnecessary in this cool, high altitude city. We rode rented bikes for miles through the carnival atmosphere, along with thousands of other people, everyone just out having a good time. There were families out walking with little kids riding tricycles, Lance Armstrong types buzzing by on fancy road bikes, and everything in between. At a park we stopped and watched huge and enthusiastic crowds of people being led by instructors in jazz-ercise and yoga, and we pondered this question: how dangerous can a city be where it seems at any one time we can see at least three dogs wearing sweaters?

Candelaria

Very dangerous, of course, this is the biggest city in Colombia. Huge swathes of the city are simply off limits to people like us, and even at 7:30am during our cab ride from the airport we saw the most incredibly prostitute-y prostitute we’ve ever seen. Sticking to the generally safe neighborhoods, though, the cops seemed to outnumber the beggars, and as long as we stayed on streets with plenty of people we felt pretty comfortable. Even so, there were a few times we were distinctly nervous, and it’s not the type of place to be wandering around without being aware of your surroundings.

Another day we visited the Botero museum, filled with paintings by the eponymous Colombian artist. We hadn’t heard of him previously, but apparently he’s pretty important and we liked him a lot. He paints fat people: fat naked men and women, fat Columbian presidents, fat Mona Lisa, even fat Jesus on the cross. It was great. We also went to the famous Gold Museum, which was filled with more gold than we’ve ever seen, mostly impressive gold pre-Columbian pieces.

All in all we really enjoyed Bogota, and are excited to move onto San Agustin.