May 11th, 2011
Well, it has been a long, long time since I have had time to write...so I am sorry for disappointing everyone about not being able to read about my adventures! Traveling with a friend and meeting a bunch of people is not very conducive to keeping up with a blog. I am currently back in Bogota, recalling the past few weeks and trying to remember the best stories from them. Where to start?
I think I left off at around San Gil about 2 weeks ago...unfortunately there are not many pictures from here on out. Me (being a little bit careless) left my bookbag in a dorm of a hostel when I was showering and someone swiped it, camera and all :( Big disappointment. I got all my pictures off beforehand, but I lost a $300 camera. They didn't even leave my guidebook, underarmor fleece, or my one bank card! Luckily, my laptop was in a safe and I had my passport and backup bank card with it. Life goes on, and you live and learn I guess.
San Gil was a nice little town itself, but the weather while we were there and before kept us from doing a lot of the things that we planned on. Rafting was a bust because all three rivers that usually run were closed due to either being too high or having a huge mudslide down the middle. The caves that we had planned on going to were also closed because of the high water. The waterfall that you can rapelle down was closed because of having too high of a volume...you get the picture. Mother nature was being a pretty big bitch to us! In any case, the last day that we were there we did get to make it to Barichara, a small little colonial village. I have been to a lot of little mountain towns, but this might have been one of the prettiest I have ever seen. All the streets are made of flat rocks or cobblestones, and the buildings whitewashed with blue and green painted around the windows. We hiked from there about 2 hours to get to a town called Guane, which was smaller and sleepier than Barichara. Both were awesome little towns with very friendly people. We also met some awesome people in San Gil - Jono and Jordan - who we would later catch back up with and do the ciudad perdida hike with. They showed us to delicious meat skewers in the San Gil park that we ate while being accosted by a drunk man telling us to leave Colombia. It was the first time I have been heckled by anyone here other than for me to buy things. He was harmless, but it was still annoying.
From San Gil, we headed up to the coast. We had originally planned to make it to a national park with high mountain hiking, but we found out that it would actually take about 12 hours to get into the park from where we were. That did not fit into our time frame, so we headed for a little beach town called Taganga. The transport night/day to get there from San Gil was in a few words...long and a little bit amazing race-like. We hopped our first bus at 7:45PM, 15 minutes after we were supposed to leave. When we arrived in Bucaramanga, a town that we had to change in, I realized that we should have missed our connecting bus by 20 minutes. We nearly ran to the bus company's office, and luckily, we found that the bus hadn't left yet...but it was on its way out of the station. At this point, we started to run and actually made it! The bus driver wasn't overly happy with us, but I was not too upset about it since it was their fault for being late in the first place. From there, it was supposed to be another about 10 hours on the bus. Wrong again! We didn't get into where we were supposed to until 13 hours later. Needless to say, I was ready to get off that bus.
When we rolled into Taganga, I was not impressed. One word for it - shithole. There were only dusty streets, expensive food, and men trying to sell us drugs. Luckily, we were only staying for a few days before setting off for greener pastures. From Taganga, we set up our Ciudad Perdida hike and set out for Tayrona National Park to spend a night at a campground.
Tayrona was completely amazing! It was a huge change from the crap town that we had just been in. We had met a Dutch/Colombian couple that were heading out at the same time as us, so we tagged along. Maria had been living in the Netherlands since she was 8, but still has a lot of family here. Her boyfriend (whose name is evading me right now) has been working in Dubai for the past 6 years as a dredger, so it was interesting to learn a little bit about what it is like to live there. The beaches of Tayrona were fantastic, some of the best that I have visited. I think what made them so spectacular was the the jungle butted right up to the edges of them. They are also littered with huge boulders that make for an awesome setting. There is also some hiking that you can do throughout the park, which we wound up finding out on a 3 hour jaunt up a pretty big hill. I wish that we would have had one more night in the park (even though the hammocks that we slept in in the campground were HORRIBLE! I mean horrible. I slept about 2 hours the whole night. That being said, I would have suffered through another night of it because I liked the park that much. Being there only for a day may help lessed that chance of me getting yellow fever I guess lol. I wasn't aware, but you were suppoed to have been vaccinated before going into the park. So far I feel fine, so I am thinking I am safe!
The rain has not stopped, but we have gotten pretty lucky with it being mostly in the afternoon hours and at night. There have been some monumental downpours. I am surprised with how fast rivers swell and subsequently go back down here, especially along the coast.
The day after we got back from Tayrona park was the departure for Ciudad Perdida, which deserves its own blog entry because it was SO GOOD! I am going to try to write that entry and post it tomorrow!
"Rain rain go away, come back another day!!"
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