La vida part dos

Hello again folks! Yes,please contain your excitement--two posts in two days! On that note, this is a continuation of what I started yesterday, so if you haven´t tuned in in a while you will want to go to the next one on the page and read it first so that what you see here makes a wee bit more sense.

OK, business being taken care of, we can get back to our story. So there I was in Bogota, trying to figure out where to go because of all the choices and my total lack of preparation, and in general wasting time. Bogota is a lovely city and the people are really great, and I feel that being there a week I got to know it pretty well. One of the highlights was the day I spent with a couple of Colombian women. I met this woman Myriam via the Lonely Planet website, when she responded to a posting I put up about travelling as a woman alone in Colombia. She is a professor at a university in Popyan and also owns bed and breakasts in Popyan and Bogota.

So I met with her and a friend of hers one day for lunch and bit of a tour around north Bogota, which looks very different from La Candelaria, the old neighborhood in which I stayed. Myriam speaks some English but her friend doesn´t, so we spent quite a bit of the day figuring out what we were all saying! We took the Transmelinial (which is kind of a bus line that has designated lanes without car traffic and is their version of a subway--Quito has one as well called the Trolle) from my hostal to her neighborhood, walked around, had some lunch, then ran some errands for things she needed to pick up for her B&B. We then went back to her place where she showed me around (it has a pool!) and had a cocktail. What a fun day and always great to see a city through the eyes of someone who lives there!

So I finally decided on leaving Bogota and didn´t have the time, I felt, to take a 20 hour bus ride to the coast, so went to a small town called San Gil, which is about 8 hours north of Bogota. It is a great little town that you can feel perfectly safe walking around in the middle of the night in. It is also the home of adventure tourism in Colombia. While there, I went paragliding over the tobacco fields, which was great fun as I have never done that before. There are pictures to prove I did it, but unfortunately they are on the camera of a woman I have not emailed yet....so maybe they will appear some other time.

I chilled out there for a couple of days and then went on to Barichara, a small perfectly preserved colonial town about 45 minutes from San Gil, and looks a bit like Tuscany. It was a great place for just relaxing in the park and walking around town, and I also met up with a woman I had met in San Gil who is biking her way through Colombia. This is not to be confused with the man I met at the hostal in Bogota from France who was biking his way across the world and extrememly puzzled when I declined his invitation for sex. But anyway, I met up with this woman and we had some lunch and a really nice afternoon.

I left San Gil at 9 in the evening and returned to Bogota at 3 in the morning. I was prepared to wait a couple of hours for a 9 hour bus to Manizales, but there was one of those minivan things (sin el bano!) leaving right away so I hopped on it. So did 3 very drunk Colombian folks in their early 20´s, so I got to spend the better portion of 6 hours repeating my name and giving puzzled looks when they tried to converse with me in slurring Spanish.

Manizales is in the western part of Colombia, and part of an area where they have been having some guerrila issues..or however you spell that. One thing I can say is there were police everywhere, although I must say I do feel a bit cheated that not once did we have a checkpoint to go through. This apparently happens on every Colombian bus, sometimes several times in one trip, and I didn´t encounter it at all!

Manizales is an OK town, but the truth is I didnt (oops, on to a new computer missing the apostrophe! There is always something missing on these variety of keyboards I use here) do much there. It is a good place to enter the national park and go to the volcano, but several people I met who had done said that due to the relatively constant cloudiness the area had been experiencing, you couldn{t actually see it that well. Also it was 80,000 pesos and I didn{t want to spend 40 bucks to not really see what I wanted to. So I went to an ecoparque in town and went on a canopy tour instead and took a walk through the forest they have.

Similair to my Bogota experience, here in Manizales some guy came into the hostal while I was watching the movie Traffic and proceeded to tell me he lived in Manizales and is Colombian/German. What he was doing in the hostal is really unclear. He started trying to give me a massage and asking me if I wanted coke and sex. Now you people know me, but I have to say the whole thing was rather creepy and thankfully the guy I was sharing a room with came down to watch the film and I didn{t have to search through my limited vocabulary to try and figure out just what the hell was going on. Apparently the assumption when you are travelling alone in Colombia that close to Medellin is that you just lost your way to the nearest brothel where you were due to report for work.

After a day or so there, I was off to Salento, which is probably one of my favorite places on this trip. You can enter the national park, Los Nevados, and it is the highest elevation where the Colombian national tree, the Cera Palma, or wax palm, grows. I went on a rather grueling hike ascending 3,000 feet from the floor of the valley to the top of the mountain that really kicked my ass. It was a lot of mud and rocks and in some places a virtually vertical ascent. Whew! The views, as you will see from the 2,000 pictures I have of it, made it totally worth it. There was a small house at the top of the mountain where the woman there gives you coffee and some sort of home made cheese. Really very nice, and she was very intrigued by my self-made trail mix.

The next day I went to a couple of coffee fincas and got to pick beans, learn how they are shelled, dried, and roasted and then have some delicous coffee. The coffee in Colombia in general seems to be a bit weak for my taste, but whatever. The hostal I stayed at in Salento is called Plantation House and they put me in the second little house they have which has it{s own porch, amazing view of the valley, and house cat, Pablo. I shared the house with a few other people and our last night we all made dinner and sat outside to watch the sunset before moving inside and building a fire. The hostal owner is interested in my interest to look after a place, and so I may be making a return visit to innsit for them in the future.

I met really great travellers in Colombia and must say that for the most part, they seem to be older travellers. Meaning mid 20{s and older rather than the 19 year olds you find in most other places. Many people are too scared to go to Colombia, so maybe it is just those with a bit more experience that are comfortable going there.

There isn{t much English spoken in Colombia, so it was good to have to try to trust my Spanish a bit more to get where the hell I was going. I had a great time there, the people are wonderful, and I venture to say I felt a bit safer there than I do in general in Ecuador. This is probably because Colombia in general has money, so there aren{t as many poor people on the street. Saying that of course, 2 guys in Bogota got robbed on 2 consecutive nights outside the hostel. This probably has to do more with the fact that 2 big hostals are there and the area is known for drunk travellers coming back really late at night and so being a pretty easy target for those that make their living off such folks.

So that about wraps it up for now from these parts. I am off to pick up Mary in a few hours at the airport, so tune in next time for the story of two sisters taking the world by the tail!

Oh, here are the Colombia pics:

http://s176.photobucket.com/albums/w190/sweidmann/Colombia/?

Que bonita esta la vida! And we are off to Colombia..

Hello again armchair travellers! Pretty sure this is going to be a two parter entry as I have been working for a few hours already this morning getting some pictures uploaded for you people and am not sure how long I can write today before I don´t know what the heck I am talking about anymore!

When we last left off, I think I just arrived in Colombia and spent US independance day in a Colombian museum, hehe. Slightly better than how I spent Colombian independence, which was July 20. In putting my pics up, I see that I have maybe one of me in Colomiba, so the pic you see here is of me and one of my fellow volunteers at Jatun Sacha, Grady, at Mitad del Mundo in Ecuador. It is a cute pic, and since cute pics of me are so rare...here it is!

OK, so back to the story at hand: Colombia is fantastic, and I am so glad I went. Apparently though, the week before I headed to Colombia, the FARC killed some 2 dozen hostages they had been holding for a number of years. I found out about it right before I went, but for obvious reasons (being that the folks read this) I didn´t mention it until my return, lest the parents freak out and be worried about me. On July 5, the nation of Colombia had massive demonstrations against kidnapping and as far as I know at this point, no one has been kidnapped in some time....so hopefully they are on a path of turning it all around.

Colombia is an interesting place to travel as a woman alone, and there is a slight chance that I am now married to a Colombian cab driver, due to my inability to master the language. I can confidently report that I am not carrying anyone´s baby though, so that is a good thing at least!

Due to my completely indecisive nature, I spent a week in Bogota, just figuring out where the heck to go, since there were so many choices! The pictures are of course going to be out of order as well, seeing as how my strong point is not computer literacy. Shannon will be very excited to see that for the first time in a long time, I managed to post the pics to the web all by myself! I did take some 6 hours, but that is another story that I am not going to cry myself to sleep with just yet.

So anyway, in Bogota I managed to visit the city´s tallest building, the Coltopatri, with great views of the city. No pics of course because it was my first day there and I was a little noid about taking such a long walk with my camera. I also went to a street market, where all manner of things were being sold: remote controls of unknown origin, albums of 1960´s salsa music, used batteries, and perhaps an unwanted child or two. In other worlds, just like your average flea market in New York.

Also in Bogota, I saw the house of Simon Bolivar, and you will get to see a lovely Colombian woman posing by the independence stuff in his garden. After that I rode up the teleiferico on a Sunday which was a piss poor decision, as it is half price and all the Colombians go to the church services up the hill in Monserrate, and it was damn hot waiting in line for an hour to go up and another hour to come back down! Up there is only the aforementioned church and some food stalls. All in all not a bad trip, but not worth the 2 hours of transport!

I also went to the Botero museum, the gold musuem (a waste as far as I am concerned unless you are REALLY into gold), and up to Zipiqueira and the salt cathederal. I went with a girl I met at the hostal, and it is a 2 hour trip up there and then you decend some 180 meters into the salt mines where they have carved out this huge cathederal, which they say holds 10,000 people! We did this in July 5, which turned out to be the day of the anti-kidnapping protest, and when we got out of the bus, there were tons of people running around with white flags and honking thier horns. Very interesting, especially since we didn´t know at that point what the heck was going on!

South America in general appears to have made a continental decision regarding the choice to not put signs about anything anywhere, so the bus driver´s directions of ¨just turn left and keep going all the way up the hill¨ were somewhat misleading. We hiked about halfway up the hill, noticed it was starting to look a little shady, and then finally asked a woman who directed us all the way back down the hill to take another left and go that way. We got a cab.

I had seen a street advertisement in Bogota about a Cuban salsa orchestra that was playing at one of the big theaters and that was an amazing show! We spent 40,000 pesos on it ($20) but it was totally worth it. It was filled with Colombians who loved the band and they had dancers on a bandstand behind the orchestra and everything and it was fantastic. After that we did the club crawl in the Zona Rosa, an upscale neighbordhood of Bogota-good night but exhuasting.

OK, better run for now as I am going to meet a friend for coffee. I´ll finish this up later or tomorrow before Mary arrives and put the pics on then!

Saludos!

Jatun Sacha, Quito, and life in the jungle

Buenos dias everyone!

Hope everyone had a great 4th of July! I spent it here in Colombia and visited the Colombian National museum. But more about the life and times of Colmbia later as this post is not about that, it is about the pictures and wrap up of my time at Jatun Sacha and Quito--that´s right, more pics are finally in the house!

As for the volunteer work, I am having a bit of mixed feelings about it at this point. While due to the large volume of people, the constant moldy clothes, and lack of actual good work to be done (because of the constant rain and mud) left me feeling a bit disappointed in the whole thing, I must say I really met some great people--both staff and other volunteers--and learned about that part of Ecuador and a way of life of the locals that we could never imagine, so that was good. I also learned about some medicinal plants and what many of the local issues are. So all in all I will call the experience a good one--it definately gave me a new appreciation for the hot shower!

Also of important note is the industiousness of the ants in this part of the world. You will see a couple of pictures regarding this, but these folks work sun up to sun down and never take a day off. Of course since it rains everyday and washes away whatever huge ant condo they are building, they have to work everyday since they must be constantly starting over.

I learned that in honor of our last night they decided to kill the last of the chickens. Unfortunatley they did it right in front of us, as we were working digging a huge whole for the pig shit, which was unexpected and unappreciated. Thankfully we didn´t have to see it, but sure had to hear it.....anyway, a few photos are of the replacement set of chickens. The chickens were originally donated by volunteers in order to have eggs, but apparently the staff dídn´t want to wait for them to start producing eggs, and so would just kill some everyone once in a while for food. Which was a shame and waste since as there were so many people, all you would get would be a wing. Why bother? I made the mistake of donating chicken feed which apparently meant that in their apppreciation I was due a special piece of chicken on my last night. Hard to expalin in my limited Spanish that I donated the feed to feed the chickens so they could start producing eggs, not so I could have a fat piece of chicken on my last night!

Oh well, such as life and communication. Let see...in the pictures, there are lots of photos of the staff and other volunteers. Some dirt here--Pedro is the volunteer coordinator and Rosa is one of the kitchen ladies. Pedro apparently has a wife and kids in Tena, Rosa is married to some guy that kills pigs, and Pedro and Rosa hook up regulary at his cabana, and everyone knows it. Latin American folks have very different ideas about monogomy and it is fun to chat with the volunteers about it, as people´s views about it tend to reflect thier age. Very interesting conversations were had.

Patricia is kind of the girl who does everything: All the cleaning of cabanas, bathrooms and laundry. She lives in the community about 40 minutes away, and so started sleeping in my cabana after my roomie Alison hooked up with Gato, one of the bosque guards. Alison started spending most nights at Gatos place (which has no bathroom) and so Patricia would stay in my room. It was fun and she is a great lady. I think she needs an American or foregin man to get her out of here and she is so wonderful (and had a crush on Steve who is a really shy brit), so if anyone of you know a suitable man, let me know and I will pass the info on!

Lots of pictures of volunteers, a few of Rob, the volunteer who never actually worked. His job seemed to be going to Tena everyday in search of real food. He did work this one time, so I was sure to get a photo of it.

There are also a few photos of our trip to Amazoonico, which is an animal rehabilitation center. Some of the animals roam free, others are in caged environments for either their own safety (they are ill and vulnerable to attack) or for the saftey of other animals. There was one monkey that I don´t have a picture of because he is in a double wired area. Apparently he got out one night and killed 20 other monkeys.

Photos of my time at Jatun Sacha are here:

http://s176.photobucket.com/albums/w190/sweidmann/Jatun%20Sacha%20y%20Tena/?start=all

and here are some pictures of Quito:

http://s176.photobucket.com/albums/w190/sweidmann/Quito/?start=all