San Gil
San Gil is a lovely town, really friendly and relaxed, cool and clean. We stayed at a really friendly hostel called Macondo and met some lovely people. We visited a beeeautiful colonial town called Barichara which was 45 minute bus ride away through the most astonishing countryside. We wandered around the cobbled streets and the white washed buildings, up to a little sculpture park at the top and during our wandering we found an incredible rock that jutted out into the glorious mountains which run through the area. Hello mountains, so good to see you again, I've missed you!
After our time spent with the very self sufficient Aussie girls on the peninsula I decided that I'd like to try that way of travelling and see if we can save some pennies whilst also getting some of the food and nutrients into our systems that had been seriously lacking in our diet of rice and patacones and rice and patacones on the Caribbean coast. I needed some serious veg. So we bought a chopping board, a billy can and a grater with a pot which we filled with herbs and spices. We were now all set for cooking well anywhere!
Ville de Leyva
After a couple of days in San Gil (and deciding against the very tempting paragliding opportunity in the adrenalin capital of Colombia) we travelled to the beautiful colonial town of Ville de Leyva which has the biggest town square in the Americas I think.
Again lovely cobbled streets (which make you stumble very easily when you're gazing up at the buildings or the mountains behind then or the sky above which I did a LOT) and white washed buildings, fresh air and mountains. It was the elections whilst we were there which was a very interesting occasion. We sat in the square and watched whilst nearly everyone in the town came out, including a lot of the Indian population, the descendants of the Musica people, in their thick wool ponchos, to register and vote. Massive people watching ensued!
We stayed in a cute old ladies place just off the square which were the cheapest digs we could find as everywhere else was about three times as much. We found amazing coffee in a little panaderia as well and hiked up into the mountain side for a little bit, almost loosing our guide book in a pause for coffee (fast becoming my new vice). Our realisation of this only came after asking directions and realising that we didn't have it anymore! So we had to walk down again and then back up a very large hill to retrieve it. Not too bad when the countryside you're walking in is that beautiful though!
We also made up to see El Fossil the only complete Kronosaurus fossil in the world still in the same place it was found in 1977. It was flipping huge! About seven metres in length. The whole area around Ville de Leyva is known for the huge amounts of fossils from the Mesozoic and Cretaceous eras.
Popayan
After a couple of days in Ville de Leyva we made our way very far south to lovely Popayan. Initially we didn't think we'd have time to visit the south of Colombia so we were very happy to discover that in fact we did! And what beauty that way beheld! It was like stepping into magic fairy tale land. Incredible undulating lush green hills dotted with cranky little trees and rocks that actually had been spewed from volcanoes a long time ago. Wowser. After a really uncomfortable night bus we made it to a lovely hostel. It was such a homely place with a perfect kitchen for cooking it up right nice! Really friendly. Popayan itself is a lovely large colonial town (not sure if it's a city), again with whitewashed buildings and a lovely big plaza and two look out points which were good to watch the sunset. It was Halloween the day we arrived and it seemed that the families went crazy for it in Popayan. It seemed to be fun to dress up their children and make them pose in front of cartoon backdrops and ask the shopkeepers for sweets. They were crazy for it. The streets were mobbed with minature characters and sweet wrappers started building up on the floor. Halloween maddness!
We visited a town called Silvia about an hour away for the Tuesday market. It is not a tourist market but one where the Guambiano people come to from the countryside around to sell their food and crafts to each other and the locals.
It's mainly a fruit and veg market in which Samly's eyes widened and his breath quickened with all the excitement and possibility for cooking! We skipped around from one stall to the next with our noses full of sweet smells and our eyes full of the colours around us. We bought many fruit and veg with many of the old ladies laughing at us when we asked how much one chilli was, saying 'take it take it!' We filled our woven bag with fruit and veg, including a bunch of tiny garlics, delicious avocados the size of a small football, massive beef tomatoes, chillies, and menthol-y tasting mora (blackberries).
We also bought some hand carved wooden spoons, about 3 metres of tiny shell and stone beaded string that the Guambiano ladies wrap round and round their necks and that must have taken the lady who strung it about a week to make! I also bought some earrings made from palm seeds and a tiny painting painted by a tiny old Guambiano lady. The Guambiano people wear very striking clothes. The men wore bright purple skirts, the women wore black pleated skirts and bright purple shawls, the men wore hand woven ponchos, they both wore very sensible black leather boots and a tiny trilbies perched high on their heads. Amazing to look at. Apparently they don't like people taking their photo so we had to be very surreptitious about it. I think Silvia is the friendliest market I have been to in my life! Everyone was smiling and laughing and saying 'hello, welcome!' Needless to say we took the food back to Popayan and Samly cooked up several amazingly tasty meals with them. Yumble.
We wanted to visit San Agustin and the desert at Tatacoa to see the stars at the observatory there and also the tombs at Tierradentro. Amongst the friends we met in Popayan we met Helen and she wanted to do this also so we set off on a little adventure together, starting with San Agustin. Leaving our big bags in the hostel we were chipping it around with our little bags again complete with several bags of food and cooking utensils to enable us to cook for ourselves wherever we ended up! Sweet.
San Agustin
First stop San Agustin. The bus ride was quite difficult. After six hours of constant juddery journeying in a small bus along and up rock littered bumpy tracks high into the mountains we arrived shaken not stirred at the side of the road near San Agustin. A Colectivo picked us up and took us to the town centre. We walked out of town a bit and up a very steep hill to find Finca el Maco a beautiful working farm with strange wonky cabanas, a huge homely kitchen, a funny guy called Rick, big camp fires, owls, all surrounded by beautiful countryside and mountains and lots and lots and lots of bloody moquos. Got eaten to death we did. Even though we turned up without a reservation and the place was full even in low season, Samly and I lucked out completely as they offered us a five star cabana for next to nothing and we lived a day in luxury before moving into the huge teepee that we had all to ourselves. Samly cooked us up such tastiness with some Silvian veg etc.
We set off almost as soon as we got there to try and make the archaeological park to see the pre-Colombian statues that are so famous. We pegged it round the park looking at all the statues sites and the best ones were all the statues placed in the forest and the ones right on top of a hill with views of the astounding mountain sides and countryside all around. The statues are carved into rocks in the same place they had landed after they had been spewed out by old volcanoes. Not much is known about the peoples who did the carving as they had not written language, so archaeologists have pieced together some theories based on what they have found. Some even purport that the statues could have been carved by the northernly most reaches of the Inca people. Graves were made next to the statues using large flat stones to mark out the shape of the grave. The creatures carved into the stones arguably represent the elements and various aspects of a spiritual life; birds to represent the spirit realm, serpents to represent the earthly realm and some other creatures to represent the underworld.
The next day we just chilled out and walked a short way to a huge valley through which a river ran.
Desierto de Tatacoa
Getting into the desert involved getting a colectivo car to Neiva and then a bus to Ville Veija and then a motor taxi straight out into the desert.
We stopped at the observatory and asked the manager and his family if we could string hammocks there. So we had our three hammocks hanging up in the porch of the observatory and looking out across the tiny red terrain of the desert filled with cacti. So we had made it to the desert for mine and Samly´s anniversary, sweet. We even got to see fireworks! Very randomly we were looking out into the darkness on our first night and spotted something like a Catherine Wheel going round, weird and very cool. Our first night there was a Friday night and the observatory was descended upon by two hundred school children! It was mental! They were so interested in us that one kid actually said at one point ´ssh ssh, I want to hear what the gringo is saying!´ They wanted to know what we thought about Colombia and various things and taking our photos, it was crazy like having the paparazzi around us! They were such cool kids.
It was a very cloudy night, there were no stars twinkling and so we decided, what with all those people being there as well, that we would wait until the following night to take a tour of the observatory and look at the stars.
During the night it monsooned. The monsoons have started getting longer and more intrusive on our day to days now. In fact they have caused chaos in the entire country. They have had huge landslides in Manizales, with water being cut off from homes and a state of emergency being called. All over the country there are floods, it's awful.
After a bit of a soggy nights sleep we awoke and spent the next day chilling in our hammocks, cooking in the family's kitchen and walking through the desert. Passing loads of cacti and goats. The land had been formed in a strange way. It was like the grand canyon but on miniscule scale, like we were giants and the land had shrunk.
I also saw Jupiter and the colours on its surface and four of its moons! I was blown away, my favourite planet! I think we might stretch to getting our own telescope when we get our new place and a garden... That last night we also tried some sweets made from cactus which were surprisingly tasty! There was a huge storm that last night and we had to take down our hammocks, get into our full waterproofs and take shelter next to the main building until it stopped. The next morning we awoke and packed up our things to take a motor taxi back through the desert into the next town, waving goodbye to probably the wettest desert we will ever know and the cutest kids Miguel and Karen that played with us for our stay.
Tierradentro
After taking a colectivo to Neiva and another bus to La Plata we thought we would be stranded there as it was the Day of the Dead celebrations and a national holiday. We met a very helpful man who got us onto a colectivo, a familiar squished up affair on the bumpy, stone littered tracks for two hours up to San Juan de Pisimbala, the Pueblo from which we can walk around the mountains to find the tombs. They found these tombs and know very little about them. They consist of stone carved steps winding down into vaults that have been carved out of the ground with pillars to support them and decorated using white, black and red dyes. As with a lot of early painting I have seem the painting seem to consist of geometrical shapes. There are also faces carved into the stone pillars.They were incredible. All three of us started humming different notes and it sounded very eerie and awesome. We went down and up quite a few of these tombs, each one was unique and an incredible experience.
Walking through the countryside around was an amazing experience also. It was like walking in a dream, so beautiful. I think this has been our favourite walking in Colombia around these parts and we were both sad that we didn't have enough time to spend more here. Walking through the clouds as they hugged the mountainsides, passing little waterfalls, walking over lush green carpet like grass, it was like heaven!
We stayed at a really lovely place too run by tiny Leonardo and his family. They cooked amazingly tasty food (as our supplies had run out and we fancied a break) and it was all so cheap.
The next day we had to head back to Popayan.
We spent the entire day travelling and made it back to the lovely, homely hostel there, cleaned ourselves up, Samly cooked us up yet another treat and feeling full and tired we fell asleep.
The next day came for us to part ways. We had been travelling with Helen for six days and she was now headed to Ecuador and we were headed back to Bogota on the night bus for our final days in Colombia before heading to a new set of adventures in Argentina. She waved us off in our taxi to the bus station and off we pootled on the final leg of our Colombian adventure.
