Finally on the coast of Colombia

It’s election weekend here in Colombia. While in most countries that would mean some sort of election sware, in Colombia, it means complete country shut down. All the bars are closed, the streets are empty, everyone is at home. Not a drop of alcohol is allowed to be bought or consumed. Supermarket refrigerators are plastered with red tape bearing the words ‘ley seca’ – or dry law. I thus have ample time (though I sit here watching Gladiator) and no more excuses to leave you hanging any longer about my adventures.

So I left you in Salento, at ‘and off we went with Omar’ to his Dairy farm at Eagle’s nest….

The view from the road up to the property was spectacular. We of course stopped along the way to take like obligatory touristy photos as we made the climb to over 3000m above sea level. Luckily for me, the bout of motion sickness that had struck me down on all my recent bus trips within 5 minutes of driving, had decided to give me a day off. I have never, ever, suffered from motion sickness before, but my recent brief encounters with the horrible nausea that sends you straight to the back of the bus to sit by the toilet for fear of vomiting is one of the worst feelings I’ve ever known. Thank God we’d bought sea sickness pills for Claire for our trip to the Poor Man’s Galapagos. This meant I only had to hold off from vomiting for half an hour while they kicked in – a very painful half an hour. Bus journeys when I forget to take them are not good. Even a recent car trip, though a rather bumpy one at that, sent me to the curb as soon as the vehicle came to a halt. I hope this doesn’t last and is just a side effect of the anti-malaria medication we have been taking. Anyhoo – tangent, once again. Back to Omar.

My crappy attempt at a panorama shot of the valley

After a tour of the house and a quick squiz out the window at the view, Omar drove us 45 minutes further up the road to a viewpoint (and very randomly placed soccer field). Here, we were surrounded at every turn by Palmas de Cera. So, I must admit, that I am not normally one that will travel out of my way to see a bunch of trees, though I did click away aggressively at the Ceibo in the Amazon. To me, they are just those tall things that can come in handy for shade and rain cover, and which sometimes spring really pretty flowers. In fact, I think my knowledge of tree names is limited to the good old gum tree, which I might add grows everywhere here. How you ask? Gondwana land. Thank you year 8 geography – though one tour guide did try to tell us the Spanish brought the trees to Australia, pre it's discovery by Captain Cook. Hmmmmm. Anyway, to my mind a tree is a tree. I must admit though that in tree terms, Palmas de Cera are very special - they can only be found in Colombia, they only grow in a few isolated spots and can grow up to 80 metres tall. As far as trees go, I’d say that is fairly exciting. There is something about them that is just so out of the ordinary that you can’t help but find yourself captivated.  So, once again, though with not as much passion as Katherine who like a kid in a candy shop wowed, ooed and ahhhhhed continuously for a good hour, I excitedly clicked away at the clumps of palms that blanketed the valley and surrounding hills.

There’s a person at the bottom of that tree

Because of our over enthusiasm for wax palms, Omar decided he would give us an extra treat and take us on a special walk (up a very step hill…) retracing some of the footsteps of Simon Bolivar along the 400 (?!?! from memory, probably older) year old national treasure and government protected ‘national camino’ that joins Salento to Bogota. Which brings me to another tangent -  I cannot believe the nerve and ignorance of some people. The owner of the hostel we stayed at in Salento also owns a coffee plantation not far down the hill, reachable only on foot via a section of the ‘national camino.’  Annoyed with youngsters who often raced motorbikes down the path past the front gate of his property, this guy, after petitioning the local council to no avail, decided to take matters into his own hands and dig up the ‘national camino,’ installing steps to deter bikes. STEPS!?!? He told us all this with a wide grin on his face. I had to bite my tongue to stop myself from telling him off. He then continued to tell us other ways he had ruined this national treasure to stop people racing down. I stood their eyes wide and dumbfounded, poking Claire in the back in absolutely disbelief that someone could have such little consideration for a piece of national history.  Grrr, it still makes my blood boil. What a pompous ignoramus.

Anyway, back to Omar’s farm. That afternoon, before watching a spectacular sunset as we sat among the clouds on the mountain top, we were introduced by the property farmhand to the local game of ‘tejo.’ In typical Colombian style, the game involves none other than your good old fashioned gunpowder. The aim, to throw your metal weight onto a piece of paper full of gun powder, which is on top of a clay covered metal ring. The result, a big bang which gives everyone a heart attack for miles. If you miss the clay covered area and your ‘tejo’ goes rolling off into the distance (or nearly clonks an innocent bystander as mine nearly did) the rule goes that you have to take a huge swig of your beer. This goes on and on until someone gets 30 points, or until everyone is so blind they can no longer throw the tejo even remotely close to the clay. Sounds like a game Australians would have invented actually and one I will definitely be teaching my cousins at Christmas.

Sunset from cloud height

To complete our ‘finca’ experience we were woken up by Omar at 5am to milk the cows so we could have warm chocolate milk with our breakfast. Well, I will admit that we were spoilt. There was no trudging down to the dairy for us in the dark. Omar brought the cow right up to the house for us, with bull in toe, so we only had to walk 5 metres in the cold. The bull had come for his honey (?!?!?), which apparently he gets every morning. Random. 

Got milk?!

Holding a cup filled with chocolate Nesquik in one hand, we all, having no technique lesson, pulled, squeezed and massaged in our own different ways with the other in an attempt to get a squirt of milk out of our cow, all the while being totally upstaged by the farmhand, who seemingly without effort got a frothy coffee effect and filled his glass and those of his two children in the time we had not even half filled ours. Guess I won’t quit my day job.

Gross, warm milk…

One thing that had definitely happened on this trip – the reigniting of my childhood love of cows. They are so cute! What really made me croon though was being introduced to something I never knew existed and something that may only exist in South America – the midget cow. (Ok, so I know that is a photo of a calf, but I couldn’t manage to get close enough to a midget cow to take a good shot…) At two years old, this poor little thing was at least half the size of other cows the same age. We spent the rest of the afternoon madly midget cow spotting. I think Omar got a bit frustrated with us asking “is that a midget cow?” every two seconds.

Sadly but surely our time had come to an end with Omar and his farm, and we were taken back down to Salento to continue on our  way. For Claire and I, this meant more trees. As if I hadn’t fulfilled my Palma de Cera quota already, we piled into the back of a little blue jeep and headed a very bumpy 30 minutes out of town to the Valley of Cocora where you will find more wax palms as you wander around.  With fears about our levels of fitness and how well we are going to cope with our upcoming 5 day trek to the Lost City, though our legs were aching from a sudden exponential increase in exercise over the previous few days, we turned down the far too skinny looking horses at the front gate (that probably couldn’t have held a 12 year old in their state, let alone myself after 6 months of very little exercise) and took on the 12km on foot. The palms here were not in clumps like we’d seen with Omar, but were scattered sporadically throughout the valley. Insert dinosaurs and you would have a scene taken straight from Jurassic park. Spectacular.

By now, I was getting over green and was getting desperate for some blue – bring on the sun and surf, so we decided to beeline it straight to the coast. From Salento we braved the night bus back to Bogota (assured it was ok by our hostel owner) so that we would arrive in time to get the 5 am (eeeek) bus onto Villa de Leyva. We absolutely sweltered on the first bus. For some reason bus drivers here think people won’t notice if they turn off the air-con at night. You don’t, until you wake up in a puddle of sweat unable to breathe because the air is so thick. Gross. Everyone seems to polite here to say anything though. Instead, the men take off their shirts and use them to fan the women and children they are travelling with, all the while everyone’s skin glistens increasingly in the fluorescent lights of the bus. Lovely.

We had planned big things in Villa de Leyva – Dinosaur remains and the like - but just our luck (or wishing) the rains came in as soon as our bus pulled up at the terminal. So, instead, and am in no way am I complaining, we got to peruse the local shops (which actually had some really nice stuff, though I still haven’t lost enough things to create space in my backpack, but it definitely is getting lighter cause I am slowly leaving a trail of my belongings everywhere I go) and have a long awaited Lebanese meal for lunch. YUM! 

The baron main plaza of Villa de Leyva

From Villa de Leyva we headed further north to San Gil and then on to Taganga. Again on the advice of the hostel owner, we braved the night bus. I almost shat myself when the bus broke down at 3am in the morning. All I could see out the window was jungle and all that was running through my head was ‘crap, crap, crap, we’re doomed’ as I’m sure was happening in everyone else’s minds – no one made a peep as if our silence in the bus would stop guerrillas or anything else out there from seeing the ginormous glowing object stationary in the middle of the road. Thanks to all the really helpful people that didn’t stop to help, but just sped past. 

So after a long and fairly non-eventful few days, for the first time in over a month, I finally could see blue sea. Though Taganga wasn’t the Caribbean haven we were expecting from the rave reviews we’d heard (replace blue water with water littered by garbage) it was so nice to wake up in the morning, look out the window and see the sun and surf or laze about in the afternoon in your hammock and read a book.

The view from our room

The heat did get to me after spending so long at higher altitude. Our hostel was extremely thoughtful however in dealing with the heat issue we had and made sure we were kept cool – they only gave us bottom sheets for the beds (?!?!), and only had cold water showers, with the water functioning only sporadically. Though hard to get into at first, an ice cold shower is very refreshing when it is 35 degrees outside. I actually began to look forward to them and I must say I felt a lot better when I found out that no one in Tagana has hot water showers.

Taganga beach

Unimpressed with Taganga beach, we decided that we should venture around the point to the apparently deserted and pristine beach of Playa Grande. Replace ‘deserted’ with ‘packed full of annoying people trying to rent you a beach chair or snorkel, or offering you a greasy massage (they literally carry round a 5 litre bottle of what look likes cooking oil) and ‘pristine’ with ‘you couldn’t fit more people in the water’ and  you have a more  accurate description of Playa Grande. Unimpressed we ignored the pleas of the beach nags and kept walking along the cactus stricken path that followed the Colombian coast, round several more heads until the path gave up the ghost and we were forced to retrace our steps back to Taganga, not without excitement of course. A huge green lizard made sure it gave me the biggest fright when it scurried off the path as my foot came down right upon it.

Next, we thought we would try our luck with Tayrona National Park. Once an area controlled by the FARC, Tayrona is now a weekend haven for Colombians and now I know why. They are really onto something special. The park, which runs along the Caribbean coastline,  has some of the most spectacular beaches and coves that I have ever seen. Big grey boulders surround white sand beaches; palm trees shade sunbakers and crystal clear and wonderfully warm water laps at the sand. Put a cocktail in my hand and I would have thought I had died and gone to heaven.

 
It wasn’t all spectacular, though hilariously amusing retrospectively- it wouldn’t be an adventure without a mishap or two along the way.

Being the good little backpackers that we are, we found the cheapest way possible to get to Tayrona National Park ($5200 COP instead of the $16000 tourist trap – yay!) and in doing so got another dose of Colombian hospitality. Sitting right at the front of the bus like dorky little school kids, we were too preoccupied with gazing out the window to avoid thinking about the speed with which the driver was taking corners and dodging in and out of traffic to think about our belongings and the fact that the bus door was wide open just in front of our feet. With one violent swerve, a bag went flying out of the open bus door as the conductor hung out the side trying to get bums to fill the last remaining seats. “Did something just fall out the door?” I said to Claire as I heard a rustle and a clunk. “Ummmm….” was her reply until we both looked down to discover our bag of supplies missing from under our feet (we’d bought up big at the supermarket in preparation for the munchies as we walked the 2 hours of so into El Cabo beach. Marshmellows, packets of cookies, bottles of water, coke, we had it all). The packed bag had somehow managed to squish itself through the small gap at our feet. Next thing we knew, the conductor was off the bus, dodging traffic and risking his life to save our oatmeal cookies that were now sprawled all over the road while we sat on the bus looking like idiots having no clue whether we should jump up and help, or tell him not to bother. Ah, I thought, he is already off, and I did so very much want those marshmallows. Within a minute he handed us back a now gravel shredded plastic bag, with everything inside. Woo hoo!! Something ironic though – all the maniac bus drivers have “how’s my driving stickers” on their back windows. Hmmm. I wonder sort of response you would get if you rang the number.

 
As for our second story of misadventure -  we spent the night at El Cabo, where you can hire out hammocks (my new found bed – they are so comfy) or a tent. Thinking it might get a bit chilly at night, we (insert ‘stupidly’ here) opted for a tent. What can go wrong with a tent you ask yourself? Besides the fact that we had failed to notice the huge black tarpaulins that lay beside the tents that would have suggested to any intelligent person that they may leak and would end in absolute disaster should it decide to rain during the night, which it is almost guaranteed to do at this time of year. On cue, it rained.  Out we jumped and covered our tent to no avail however. Somehow, water managed to flood Claire’s side of the tent, which must have been slightly on the down hill. The poor thing woke up in the middle of the night, absolutely soaked, lying in a puddle of water. Not the highlight of the trip.

The coconut that would have landed on my head had I not gone straight into the water

To makeup for midnight water misadventures, we opted for the easy way out of the Park - we hired horses for the last hour of the journey. We weren’t going to. We were going to be good and walk the whole way in preparation for the Lost City Trek, but the guy kept dropping his price lower and lower that it became too hard to resist. Lucky me too – I finally got a good horse!!!! With the slightest squeeze off he went in a beautiful canter. YAY!

Now, back to Taganga for the 5 day Lost City Trek, which is going to be a serious test of my fitness, or lack thereof…

Ps. Have you ever seen a pineapple growing?

Weird, huh?