Down the east side and our trip in the south

5th October - 8th November


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!

On the way up we passed an artisan shop and I bought some hand twisted rope that should come in handy when we need to fix camping stuff to our bags.


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.

That night we went up to the roof and found lots of people and about five different telescopes of different sizes. There was some cloud in the sky but it was fast moving so at points we had clear views of some constellations, the moon and Jupiter! I have never looked through such powerful telescopes before and it is absolutely mental. The crazy professor told us a lot about the sky of which we understood some of as his Spanish was so clear and hugely animated and well pronounced. We asked him questions about why the moon waxes and wanes from top to bottom in Colombia when at home it moves from side to side and we talked about Sir Patrick Moore and Carl Sagan. We saw the moon so vividly it sent shivers down my spine in the warm night. We could see every nook and crany of the craters. We tried to take some photos but then the Prof came along and took some beauties!

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.

Back to the Mountains

After weeks on the frenetic, crazy, hot, loud Caribbean coast we travelled south again to return to the mountains. in our longest and most involved journey yet. We travelled for just over twenty four hours from Punta Gallinas to San Gil in Santander. We went from one mode of transport to the next with the fluidity of running water, it was incredible! We love being on the move so we were in heaven!


On our last morning at the tippedyest top of South America in Punta Gallinas we waited for the monsoon to stop and boarded our little speed boat at 10am.
Then we pootled our way around the coast to Port Bolivar which took one and a half hours.
Then we took a jeep to Uribia which took one and a half hours.
Then a car to Rioacha which took one hour.
Then a bus to Santa Marta which took three hours.
Then we took a buseta and walked to our hostel.
After we arrived we repacked our morchilas, showered, bought lots of food from Exito and then
Took a taxi to the bus station in Santa Marta.
Then a bus from Santa Marta to Bucaramanga which took ten hours.
Then finally we took a bus to San Gil which took two and a half hours.


An amazing journey and one I felt I had to geekily document here!
It was incredible to see the countryside change from the burnt orange of the desert cliffs on the peninsula to the lush green, unbelievably gorgeous fairy tale like hills of Santander. In the morning after our night bus from Santa Marta all the way down to Bucaramanga I awoke with my head on the window, opening my eyes to misty cloud hugged mountains. I sighed, 'I'm back!' I thought as I smiled at the mountain peaks. I love you montanas.


We loved the massive drop in temperature, the serenity, that everywhere was so clean! Tranquilo, so green that it was like returning to the Shire.


hmmmmmmmmmmm mountains x

La Guajira Peninsula 19th - 25th October

We have since returned from a place that felt to me exactly like the end of the earth. And in some ways it was. With a few set backs, some determination and some luck we made it to the most tippedy top of Colombia and indeed the entirety of South America (this pleased the geek in both of us as we will now be touching the tippedy top and the bippedy bottom of the sub continent).

 We first travelled to Riohacha and stayed the night in a tiny and insanely cheap little old lady’s hotel right next to the bus station and the next morning we awoke and asked around for a car to Uribia. Uribia is the next main town inland from Riohacha in the lower part of the area we were to be travelling through, La Guajira. When we got to Uribia we were met by a frenetic Wayuu father and son who literally squeezed us onto their collectivo truck. We smiled politely as we pushed ourselves into unfeasibly small gaps in between people on the wooden bench in the back of the truck and began to take stock of our surroundings. As we looked about I started to take in the mannerisms of the Wayuu people around me. We had been told by some Colombians that they were unfriendly and strong willed people, over my time in Upper Guajira I found them strong willed but definitely not unfriendly.

 I immediately noticed the large colourful ankle length smock dresses that the women wore and their singing voices as they spoke, the pitch rising and falling. So we were made space for by a strong faced matriarch and squeezed on with every nook and cranny around us being filled with boxes, huge bags of food, bikes, kids etc etc. Twice there seemed to be about 20cms worth of a gap and the father squeezed on someone else! Their use of space defied reason.

After we eventually set off for Carbo de la Vela, staying remarkably together and travelling at some speed for just how much we had loaded on, I started to notice the colour of the landscape around us. From the incredibly long and straight road I saw how the earth was now an orange colour and that there were sparse desert shrubs interspersed with cactic of two varieties. One was made of joined lines of round pebble shaped sections and covered in spikes and the other was long tall upright thick green stalks with spikes coming out sideways. Here is a baby one...

 The journey from Uribia to Carbo de la Vela in the truck took almost three hours! We were actually very lucky as slowly we started to drop off people at their houses with their small mountains of goods they had gathered in Uribia and it was incredible to see how these Wayuu families lived absolutely in the middle of nowhere. As we drove away each time, waving, it was as if we were going to be the last people they saw until the truck came back again, unbelievable! Each time we arrived the rest of the family would come out of the houses which were surrounded by lines of upright cacti that acted as a fence.

Finally we were dropped in Carbo de la Vela which is basically a long line of empty wooden huts, a few which are restaurants at one time and a couple of tiendas selling drinks and various small items of food with the Caribbean sea on the one side and the desert stretching out into the distance on the other.

 We are in the quietest time of the low season, dead in the middle of the monsoons, so Carbo was a ghost town. We saw only about three other tourists in our two nights. This is what also made it harder for us to get to Punta Gallinas about a two hour journey by jeep and boat around the peninsula. We wanted to get there for Samly’s birthday and planned to spend two nights in Carbo and then travel to Punta Gallinas for three nights.

We stayed at Pujuru in Carbo, a hostel run by a Wayuu family and one of the only ones open! We slept in Chinchurros which are traditional hammocks of the Guajiro people woven of cotton threads or palm fiber like fishing nets, and they are the most comfortable hammocks I have ever experienced (and I am becoming quite a hammock connoisseur over all these years!) A Chinchurro is a also wide hammock with long blanket like sides that hang down and when it comes to sleeping you can wrap them around yourself to create a little cocoon.

Their family home and the hostel was built out of mud and cacti lined walls, complete with cacti lined roofing. Unfortunately for us though the sky decided that it wanted to have two of the biggest storms we have experienced yet in Colombia just as we decide to have a tentative roof above our heads and to sleep in cotton cocoons, and with hilarious consequences. As usual we had gone to bed just after the sun and had about two hours sleep when we were awoken by the biggest thunder clap right above our heads, (so loud that it made the hairs of my skin stand up and my heart skip), and a stream of water began pouring directly onto my head. I tried to wrap myself tightly in the blanket like sides of the Chinchurro but it was not good, I was getting soaked! I jumped up and out of my Chinchurro and with my torch managed to quickly find the only dry spot under our roof, a small metre squared area, and wrapped my sheet around myself. Sam felt sorry for me and joined me and we stood there getting gradually more and more wet, the splashes and rain falling on us as it pelted through the cacti and fell down the edges of the roof. Monsoooon! After about an hour of standing, waiting and with no seeming end to the storm in sight, I decided to try and break into one of the cabanas to try and get to a drier place. I checked the nearest one but it was padlocked so then checked the one next to it and it was gloriously unpadlocked! With only the thought of a dry place in my mind and my wish to avoid using my hand through the small waterfall that was falling in front of the door, I raised my foot and karate kicked the door open! Swathed in my bed sheet and flailing my torch around under pelting rain, thunder and lightning flashes must have looked quite a terrifying sight to the poor soul I startled awake inside the cabana!! Still, we laughed about it in the morning!

During our two days in Carbo we washed in bucket showers, took walks through the surrounding desert in the dangerous and unbelievable midday heat

 (the photos simply do not show just how searingly hot it was), avoiding the strange cartoon like flying langostas...

...we walked over the stinkiest fishy beach and passed fishermen and a kite surfer. The family had a lot of children who were as happy and curious as the other children I had met throughout my time so far in Colombia.

We also saw some juxtaposition of cultures evident in the landscape. We came across a huge mound with a large wooden cross on the top overlooking the sea. On its bank were small mounds of shells.

It is known that the indigenous people collect the shells for a sacred ritual called poporo. They believe that shells exist as a sort of spiritual middleman between the light of the sun and the dark of the sea, and they can tell the history of a area by interpreting the shell’s colour and markings.

 Throughout these two days we had been asking the senora whether we can get a boat to Punta Gallinas. It was looking increasingly unlikely that we would be able to as the storms had clogged all the roads with puddles (we need to get to the port which was a forty-five minute jeep ride away). After our walk around the surrounding desert we talked and decided that we weren’t going to have any luck with getting to the peninsula for Samly’s bday and that t would be better to cut and run down into Santander to make sure we were somewhere good for it. As we returned to Pujuru some Colombians we had met told us that there were two girls also trying to get to Punta Gallinas, two Aussie girls and as we spoke to them they steeled us with renewed hope that we would get there and so we decided to stay one more day, just in case. We made sure that we didn’t get our hopes up and that night there was only a mild rainy pattering and I only got a little bit wet in the night. We awoke to huge puddles remaining on the floor but the bonus was that one of the grils was fluent in Spanish (massive help!) having lived in Cali for two years and she helped us to negotiate a jeep after a few hours of sun and a boat all the way there to Punta Gallinas! It looked like we were going to make it after all!! So our determination had paid off and at about midday we were given the green light and drove in our jeep to Port Bolivar where a small speed boat was waiting for us and a one and a half hour boat journey lay ahead. Unfortunately, the Caribbean sea was not being its usual self after the storms of the previous days and was insanely choppy, completely soaking us every other second as we drove across the waves (I was still picking the dried salt out of my ears five days later!)

Mercifully after a hour and a half we pulled into a channel which held calm water and I wiped my stinging eyes to take in the view now that I could actually see. We were driving though a large channel of calm green blue sea, with lines of lush green mangroves rising intermittently from out of it, flanked on both sides by small but vivid burnt orange cliffs, all under a powder blue sky with wisps of cloud occasionally punctuating its unendingness.

We pulled into a small jetty and were met by Francisco the Director of an ecotourist agency that helps create links between the Wayuu and tourists, and some members of the Wayuu family we were going to stay with. We climbed atop the small cliff to where the family’s house is and found some small open sided huts made of mud and cacti but mercifully with corrugated iron roofs!

We set up our Chinchurros under the roof nearest the edge of the bright orange cliff which was one side of the small peninsula sticking out into and surrounded on both sides by the greeny blue of the sea. Yep! Like something on a different planet!

Lots of cute goats around and at times it sounded as if they all knew my name "cllaiiire!"

It was really difficult at times to register in my brain that what I was actually seeing was real. My eyes seemed to be taking it in but my brain had real difficulty understanding! The colours were so vivid and the landscape so seemingly fictitious! We spent three heavenly days here, over Samly’s birthday, with Maddie and Ellie and the Wayuu family, we felt so remote, literally like we had reached the end of the earth.

The sunsets at the end of each day were indescribably vivid that it was like we had just simply yet magically stepped inside a painting. We were lost in a swirling mass of colour, dotted with the purple black of tiny puffed clouds and the high up wisps of clouds that didn’t seem able to keep still in the melting sky.

On our first full day there (we arrived a hour or so before sunset on the first day) we took some bikes and one of the kids of the family Freddo helped guide us to Taroa Beach. The bike ride would be for one and a half hours across the desert to find huge swathing sand dunes that undulated and fell away into a crystal blue sea. Along our way it was so hot that it felt like I could feel my blood boiling in my bones. Luckily we had mountain bikes because nearly all the paths were rock filled, leading to both our arms and our bums feeling like pneumatic drills!

We had the entire landscape to ourselves. Massive sprawling sand dunes, the orange of the desert landscape littered with scraggily bushes the faint green of cacti and craggy rocks.

Here is the astonishing Taroa Beach…

We passed plenty of flying langosta, large herds of goats, a multitude of cacti and the occasional person on bike or horse which Freddo would stop and chat to for a bit (some of which had a recently slaughtered and folded in the thirds goat on the back of their bike/motorbike). As we were returning, the sun was mercifully slinking in the sky and Freddo was worried about making it back in time to herd the goats away for the night, a huge snake rapidly slithered across my path! I shouted “snake, snake!” and spun around but there was no one there to see it, just me. It was huge and maybe a constrictor like the baby one Freddo showed us.

We watched the sunrise on Samly’s birthday, our first sunrise in South America.

 It was a calm one, made more interesting with cloud. After the massive effort and excitement of the previous day’s bike ride we decided to take it easy this day, keep out of the sun’s glare and hang out in our Chimchurros. Although we did go for a little wander and swim in the nearby bay.

I managed to make Sam my present and secretly a card and a cake, of all things!

We bought the ingredients in Carbo and the girls made it in the coals of the family’s fire whilst I kept Sam busy. It was a delicious limon and panella cake, complete with frosting and thanks to Ellie’s culinary mastery. We ate it all up and spent the rest of the evening drinking delicious ron after another magnificent sunset. A birthday he is never likely to forget!!

The time had come for us to leave. Just as our time here had begun though, there was jeopardy. We awoke to rain (I know, in a desert!), puddles were forming and it was looking unlikely that our boat would go and even if it did, I was dreading the tumultuous waves and continual soaking similar to our journey here. We waited and we waited and we figured out that we had to go as our boat back to Port Bolivar was taking the family’s fish to sell. At about ten AM a break in the clouds came and we were hustled aboard. They must have though me strange dressed in my bikini and sarong awaiting the soaking I received on my way here! 

 The other girls were carrying on round the peninsula to try to reach a national park so we set off in our boats together and separated as we went our different ways. Out of the channel and into the sea, which was as calm as calm can be! Phew!! It was a fantastic journey, with the boat characteristically full to bursting with a variety of goods and people and because this time I could actually see the coastline as we zoomed back around the peninsula to Port Bolivar. Then Hawk eye Sam thought he saw something on the horizon, a black shape! As we were straining to see the others in the boat starting shouting and saying “delfin, delfin!” And sure enough there was a large pod of dolphins heading straight towards us! We saw tails and flippers and even whole dolphins at times jumping right out of the water! It was majestic! They must have been feeding as we saw lots of fish jumping high from the wves to try to escape their clutches. Just magical. What a magical end to a magical trip, full of wonder and the feeling of remoteness.

I wonder what our return to the mountains will bring? But before that a mammoth journey lay ahead for us…

Coolness and green and calm awaits us, just let’s negotiate our last journey along the crazy, sweating frenetic Caribbean coast.