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/?