Highway through the danger zone

We are behind in our blogging (again!). I blame the fact that while I had the best of intentions for my time this week, my iPad (where I write all these wonderfully entertaining updates) was left behind in a bus and I haven’t been able to inspire myself to kick H off a computer and write all this down. Also, I am quite lazy anyways. Until now that is! Under normal circumstances I would be feeling guilty and pushing H and I to get our acts together and start putting together some posts so you could all know where we are and what we are doing. But fortunately, as you may have noticed on our countdown, G and M are on their way to join us in Ecuador and that means that for two blissful weeks we will have someone else responsible for all the updates. Exactly like the last time G came to visit, we have gotten so helplessly far behind that we have even changed countries without an update. And so on this fine Tuesday I will wrap up our last days in Colombia, and H will be taking over the first week we spent in Ecuador.

The debate as to whether or not certain areas of Colombia are dangerous is endless. There are areas that have historically been controlled by a blend of paramilitaries, narco traffickers, the FARC, and other such notorious groups, and these are the ones that people have been sure to warn us about. These are also the areas nearest to the borders or the jungle, and are the exact areas we had to push through in order to get south to Ecuador. Throughout our time in the interior we were cautious and tried to be very aware of our surroundings. And nothing happened other than fun times with ridiculously sweet locals who went out of their way to help us. Then we arrived in Pasto, and our cautiousness and suspicion were greeted by very interesting locals. I have found that Colombians in general are very fond of attention, but in Pasto they would stop their car in the middle of the road and get out to pose in H’s pictures. They would also make the strangest smirk face at us in the street, and once I started to ignore the madness in favor of enjoying the buildings and they got a bit verbally aggressive in their demand for eye contact. So. Strange.

But Pasto is a very interesting city, surrounded by hills rolling into a ring of mountains. There are old buildings in various states of repair strewn through town, and the views from the church on the top of one of the hills was fairly impressive.

In fact, there are quite a few impressive churches, gilded or painted, gothic or colonial, and more often than not full of people in various states of prayer.

But nowhere did we come across anything scary or dangerous. Unless you include the Anorexic Style store:

We were happy to find that the women in this town were less plastic than we had come across in other Colombian cities, but I’m not sure a trade for excessively thin anorexia is an upgrade.

The best part of our time in Pasto is finding one of our good friends from Guatape. We decided to all get out-of-town for a day trip to the Laguna de la Concha, where we trekked into some swampy tall grass around a seriously pretty lake.

With nothing else really to keep us in Pasto, and my being fairly unsure how to react to the locals, we moved along to Ipiales, Colombia’s main border city with Ecuador. We were cautious. We had even brought a male along with us for extra security. And Ipiales was a little freaky.

We stayed in what we were told is one of the safer areas of town, which also happened to be a half block away from a red light district. Apparently no one messes with hookers, since they have their own market security by catering to all members of the male community. Our hotel asked us not to be outdoors after 10pm, to only walk on certain streets, and to be careful when we were out-of-doors. And H swears that she could both see and feel the fear in people’s eyes as we moved about. We were good, only went to the main square to get nourishment and then returned straight to our hotel for movie watching. We did get to see the ladies at work on our way back in, an interaction that surprised all three of us in how overt it all was.

The only reason to stay in Ipiales is because we wanted to see the church at Las Lajas, a nearby town. It is well-known and a huge pilgrimage site, apparently second in the world for miracles attributed to it.

So of course I went and prayed for a miracle for us. I was picturing as many people as I could being happy, rolling through fields of flowers in love in life. That’s a pretty good miracle in my eyes… and we admired the church, its river and waterfall, and had a seriously peaceful morning. Fantastic way to spend our last hours in Colombia. Then we booked it straight across the border to Ecuador!

Tags: Colombia, Ipiales, Laguna de la Cocha, Las Lajas, Pasto, travel blog