Colombia
I love Cuenca, but every now and then, a person just has to see new sights. With my one month unpaid vacation, I decided it was time to know Colombia. When I was 5 or so, my family went to Colombia to adopt my younger brother, Mike. I wasn´t naturalized yet, which means I got left behind. Finally, I had the chance to know my brother´s birth country, so I lugged out my backpack and made my way from Cuenca to the Colombian border, 15 bus hrs away.
A little bit of research told me where it was relatively safe to cross the border by land. I had a minor problem at the border, but it was because the incompetent migration officials in Cuenca had told me that I, as a visa bearer, didn´t need a salido (offical permission to leave the country), when in fact I did, as I´d suspected originally. Thankfully, the ecuadorian border officials were extremely helpful, and got me through the border with little delay.
I have now seen the Andes in 3 different countries (I lack only Bolivia), and it´s amazing how different they are in each country. In Perú, the mountains are just freaking huge. In Ecuador, they have a rugged, unforgiving look about them. And in Colombia, they tend to be carpeted with very lush, green vegetation. When our bus stopped for a break, I remembered that with lush vegetation comes heat. We were in a very hot valley. Due to the heat, and doing nothing but sitting for 5 hrs, I didn´t feel like eating, but everyone started buying cups full of what looked like plain yogurt, or sour cream. Kumis, as it is called, is like yogurt, but tangier and a tad sweeter, and turned out to be a perfectly refreshing snack. Upon returning to Cuenca, I found a grocery store that sells kumis and discovered that if I throw it in a blender, along w. fresh local fruit, I have the best south american smoothie.
My first major stopping point was Salento, a small, laidback town that is a popular weekend getaway for Colombians. It´s located in what is called the Zona Cafetera, or the Coffee Zone, because the altitude, climate, and balance of sun and rain is perfect for the production of coffee plants. I don´t drink coffee, but I thoroughly enjoyed the walk to, and the tour through, a local organic coffee plantation. Near Salento is a wax palm forest that I wanted to see. The forest, with the tall graceful palms, was beautiful, but it was the ride back that was more memorable. At the palm forest, I ran into a guy from my hostal. He told me that on his trip to the forest, they´d put 17 people on his jeep. I thought that was a rather high, and unsafe, number. But then I got on the jeep to come back home, and counted that we had 17 people too. I was joking to myself that surely we could fit more people on the jeep, when in fact we stopped, and picked up 6 more people – 23 in total!!!!! 3 in the cab, 3 on top, 6 of us (including myself) hanging from the back, and 11 poor souls smushed in the middle. All motorcyclists in Colombia are mandated to wear a helmet. It seems to me that all people riding on top of and hanging off the back of jeeps should be held to, or at least offered, the same headware standard.
From Salento, I rode into Bogatá at 1:30am with an Israeli named Liran who I´d met in my hostal. When we arrived at the hostal that he had picked out, we learned that there was one room left, and it had only 1 double bed. By this point it was 2am: certainly not a smart time of night to be hostal hunting. We silently acknowledged that it was not an ideal situation, but we both knew that these things happen sometimes when you travel. Anyway, we were both so exhausted that we were both asleep within minutes.
The next morning I realized that I´d spent enough time in South America that I could finally read Hebrew. The hostal where we stayed is very popular with Israelis, and as a result, most of the signs in the hostal are written in Hebrew. I saw the sign next to the exit door, and asked Liran if the sign told me that I had to leave my room key at the front desk. Affirmative. I saw the sign in the bathroom above the toilet, and asked Liran if the sign said that I was supposed to throw toilet paper in the waste basket, not in the toilet. Again, affirmative. It turns out there was only one sign that I couldn´t guess the message, and it had something to do with calling Israel.
LOVED Bogatá. Especially the area known as La Candelaria, the historic heart of Bogatá. Walking through the streets of La Candelaria, with its beautifully painted colonial style architecture, museums, old churches, and little cafés, I felt more like I was walking around Cuenca, instead of a metropolis of 8 million people. The only thing I didn´t like about La Candelaria was that while it has a TON of cafés, there are very few restaurants. One night Liran and I were looking for a place to eat, and all we could find were cafés. At one point I said, “Do people in Bogotá ever eat real food, or do they just eat crossaints and coffee cake all day?!?!”
Before leaving Bogotá, I wanted to see the famed salt cathedral in Zipaquirá, a town outside of Bogotá. First, I had to figure out Bogatá´s transit system to get to a point where I could take a colectivo to Zipaquirá. Once in Zipaquirá, I knew the salt cathedral was a 15 min. walk from the town center, but had to figure out in which direction (The cathedral is built inside a salt mine). Once I had arrived at the salt cathedral, I then had to figure out their confusing system of where one buys a ticket, and then stand in line for a tour. While very open to tourists, Colombia doesn´t cater to tourists. Meaning, it´s hard to find hostals that do one day laundry service, or tours to popular sights, or other amenities that backpackers come to rely on. It would´ve been much more convenient if my hostal had provided explicit directions for how one gets to the salt cathedral from central Bogatá. But then, I wouldn´t have had the pleasure of knowing that I´d figured it out myself. The salt cathedral itself was quite fascinating, and I wish I could show you all pictures. But due to lighting issues, it really is one of those things where photos, unless you have amazing equipment, just leaves you lacking.
From Bogotá, I made the 7 hour trip to Cali, the salsa (dance, not condiment) capital of the world. It was on this trip that I experienced one of the most ironic moments of my life. While enjoying the scenery, the following ran through my head…
Colombia is such a great country…why don´t more people come to Colombia? Oh wait, because everyone thinks the country is overrun by guerillas. That sucks. Yeah, there are guerillas here, and there are definitly places I wouldn´t travel to in Colombia. But it´s not like guerillas are jumping out of every bush. I know, traveling has inherent risks, and things could happen, but I honestly, I feel relatively safe in Colombia. I wish other people could see that there´s more to Colombia than the guerillas.
Just at that point, someone started the DVD on the bus. The good thing about long distance busses in Colombia is that most of them will show 1 or 2 movies through the course of the trip. The bad thing is that they are always stupid violent action movies that are played so loudly that you can´t tune them out. The movie at this particular moment was a Schwarzeneggar movie. I don´t know the name of the movie, but it´s the one where his wife and son are killed by a Colombian guerilla near the Colombian consulate in Washington. This moment was much much more awkward than sharing a bed with Liran in Bogotá. It´s a very surreal, educational, and uncomfortable thing to be a US citizen in another country, and to see a movie depicting how the US views the country that your traveling through. I´m don´t really feel I can adequately describe my feelings here, so I guess I´ll move on.
Let´s talk about language. I felt like a beginner Spanish learner all over again. Without a doubt, I understood more and was able to communicate myself more effectively than I would´ve been able to a year ago, but it was still humbling. Not in a bad way – actually, it´s good experience to hear how people use the same language so differently. Colombians speak so quickly and with such a different accent than I am used to, that, if I heard people speaking but wasn´t listening for the individual words, it almost didn´t sound like Spanish to me. But I will say, I was very proud of the fact that I travelled through Colombia without my Spanish dictionary. Obviously I don´t know every Spanish word one can know, but I figured by this point, I had a pretty good vocabulary that if I didn´t know a word, I could figure out other ways to express it, or to solicit the word.
Hated Cali. I´m sure there are some really fabulous parts of the city that I missed out on, but in the short time that I was there, it just seemed to be overrun with smarmy men who wouldn´t stop looking at me like I was some kind of prey. Cali is the only place where I didn´t like the men.
Outside of Cali, I found Colombians to be warm and respectful in their interactions, both with one another and with me, as an outsider. Ecuadorians pride themselves on their politeness, a belief which some days amuses me, and other days annoys me. I could cite several examples in which, under my definition of what is socially correct or expected, I find Ecuadorians to be quite impolite. Colombians, however, are different. I think I´m a more polite person just for having been in Colombia for a few weeks. And they´re not polite in a sweet sticky fake face way, or in a I´m only saying this because I´m required by social convention, but in what appears to be a very genuine, inherent manner. Being in latinamerica, it´s one thing to find the women to be congenial and respectful. But to be treated with dignity by the men of various social classes and professions (including the police and military, taxi drivers, etc.) – well, it was just very refereshing. It made the men seem even more attractive to me, and I already found many Colombian men to be physically very attractive.
After escaping Cali, I rode for 4 hours on what must be one of the most awful roads in the world to get to a place called San Agustín. But it was vale la pena (worth the pain) because San Agustín is famous for hundreds of sculptures of people and animals. Specialists know that these sculptures were made as early as 3300 BC, and were created up until the coming of the Spaniards. Even someone who does not specialize in pre-colombian culture can see the evolution of details and subject matter in the statues. But what is most fascinating to me is that in the year 2006, with all of our accumulated knowledge, and technology, and stuff, little is known about the culture which created these statues. Specialists can´t even identify the name of the culture, or what happened to them once the Spaniards came. I just think it´s so wonderfully humbling that there is something beyond our reach of knowledge. We can know that they existed on earth, see some of their handiwork, but beyond that, they´re a mystery, and that´s very appealing to me.
My last sightsee was a famous church in Las Lajas, and then it was time to cross the border and come back into Ecuador. I had had such a relaxing and enjoyable time in Colombia and it was just what I´d needed. But as every traveller knows, it gets old living out of a suitcase, bouncing from hostal to hostal, having conversations with people every day that you´ll never see again. It was time to go home. And I realized, as I walked across the bridge, that I was I going home for the first time in over year. When people ask me where home is, it´s hard to answer. If they want to know, where do I want to be on Christmas day, where are the people who have known me my entire life – well, then the answer is Newton, IA. If they want to know, where do I most feel like myself, where can I surround myself with people whose perspectives most mirror mine, then the answer is Madison, WI. But if they want to know, where is your life right now, where is the place where your bed is made, where you want to crash after you´ve been traveling, then the answer is Cuenca, EC. Under that definition, it´d been a long time since I´d gone home, and it felt really nice.
Tags: Travel
jenniferadams515
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