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Another week in Colombia?

31 Jan

So Ecuador lost the football match. And we returned to Colombia!

I know, I know. I have just spent I don’t know how many posts being excited about our plans to leave Colombia (6 is the answer, I just had to count them 🙂 ), and he we go, jumping at the first chance to return. But it really does make sense. 1) We want to go spend at least a few weeks to over a month working our way down the Pacific Coast of Ecuador surfing and generally relaxing. And the coast is about 12 hours away from Northern Ecuador, where we were planning on waiting for our family. So the timing doesn’t really work there since they arrive on the 1st of February. Also, 2) we intend on performing a loop through the Amazon but that would make us see the same parts of Ecuador again later with the G & M visit. Our choice was to either spend our time looking for things to do in Northern Ecuador (and the other things we were interested in were all much more expensive – parks, transport & lodging) or to trek back to Cali to visit our people while we had the time. Also, 3) this gave us a finite amount of time that we could subsequently spend in Cali (which is a sticky city if I’ve ever seen one!) since we must meet M & G’s plane in Quito.

Plus, Colombia won the game.

So we decided to stop by the beautiful Cascada la Paluz waterfall 3km outside the city of San Gabriel (which was surprisingly adorable) on the way to the border. We had vague directions from the guidebook I had been studying, and we assumed that once we got on the right road it would simply be a matter of following the path. Not so much. Turns out you can take any road, according to the locals, and yet not all of the various diverging paths lead to the same spot. So H lead us into another pathless, flower-filled field and we rolled down the steep hill together. We even greeted the woman doing laundry who watched us stumble down through her fields! But in the end we followed the groups of livestock (pigs that lead to sheep which in turn put us in contact with the cows who really seemed to know the way) and just sat and marveled at the natural beauty.

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We probably could have stayed the entire afternoon, but we were hesitant to sleep in Ipiales again. So we crossed the border, bused, and then colectivo taxi-ed all the way to Tuquerres. We were back to bartering and our ridiculously sweet driver decided to help us find accommodation in town for the night. Everyone in town seemed absolutely shocked to see us, and were not very exact with responses to simple questions (like is there hot water, or where is there internet, or where does the bus pass to the Laguna Verde and at what time does it pass by). This does not seem too surprising with the abundance of information that link above will give you on the city… Locals also disagreed about the relative safety of the area (which we find in Southern Colombia to just be generally true) so we decided that on the off-chance some people were right and it was dangerous we were not going to simply go and hike to the volcano ourselves.

We eventually did find a bus to take us to the base of the mountain, had quite a climb to the crater. H found some really interesting new friends and took some fabulous photos, which she will post at some undetermined time in the future (we need internet, a computer, and the software to all match up… this has become increasingly rare these days). This is the best I have for you:

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Then we jumped into the ridiculously long travel portion of this mad dash north and bused ourselves all the way to Cali. We are staying with my boyfriend (yes, family and friends… I have a boyfriend. He insists on the title. It must be a machismo labeling thing that we either don’t have or I have never encountered up north) and we started our time here by getting the cutest inexpensive dresses we could get our hands on and dancing the night away. So. Much. FUN!!!

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But somehow said boyfriend got deathly ill with some sort of throat abscess and we have been cooking soup, learning and preparing random local remedies, and chilling close to home for the past few days. I have spent more time with him at different doctors’ offices than I could had imagined possible, and my vision of the health system here is a little shocked. H has been a trooper and using our extensive network of contacts here to still get her dance on with as many different salsa partners as possible while she can (we can only hope that Ecuador has the same quality of dancers as we found to learn from here in Cali!), but largely we are a relaxing, movie-watching, and quiet-afternoon-lunches-out-with-friends-we-met-across-the-country sort of house. We will shuffle along to Ecuador on the 31st early, and plan on arriving at yet another volcano before we meet G & M in Quito at night on the 1st.

Luck & Love all, because (hopefully) this may be my last post for a couple of weeks!!

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Highway through the danger zone

29 Jan

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.

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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.

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

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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.

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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.

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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!

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