Basketball at Midnight

Sorry for the vast amount of time since the last post. Selby and I have been in the mountains for the first half of the last week, and in hill stations without good internet for the last few days.

We took the night bus out of Bogota for El Cocuy, a tiny little town on the edge of the national park with he same name, a span of densely packed, extremely high mountains.  The ELN, one of the leftist guerrilla groups that, along with the FARC, is responsible for much the negative Colombians news you may have heard about in the last 30 years, occupied the area until 2002.  Now that order has been restored, it is a very accessible but rarely visited range. They anticipate the area greatly expanding over the next several years, and I can see why- it is a relatively easy hike to 15,000 feet with stark mountains and easily reached glaciers.  Selby and I stayed at a small house located at 3,600 meters high, which was run by  Guillarmo, son of the local landowner, who had recently come to the farmhouse.  He had gone to cooking school and spoke good English and has dreams of turning the place into a nice hostel/guesthouse that offers cooking classes as well as mountain access.  As you might imagine, the food we ate there was fantastic.

On our second day, we left the farmhouse after breakfast heading for the mountains.  We hiked up to Laguna Grande de la Sierra, which my GPS recorded at 4,575 meters, or 15,009 feet (and the sign suggested was slightly higher). At that height, I  suffered minor altitude sickness, including a headache and slight numbness in the fingers, and Selby had some dizziness to add to that.  In all of my treks, I am relatively confident that that is the highest I have ever been.

When we came back down from El Cocuy, we stayed a day in the village.  Guillarmo needed to pick up a package from the village, and so he and an Australian girl who was staying in the farmhouse also journeyed down, a journey that took 4 hours by milktruck.  Indeed!  These mountains have so little tourist traffic that you can hitch a ride on the milk trucks that traverse all of the rural mountain farms every day.  They leave El Cocuy at 6am and get into the neighboring town of Guican around 12:30pm (the stop at Hacienda Esperanza, where we were staying, was at 8:30am).  As we circled around the farms, we passed some magnificent scenery…. so magnificent that I am not  even able to describe it sufficiently in words.

The next day, Selby and I took off for Mungui, a small little mountain town a few hours north of Bogota.  Our next major destination was San Gil (our current location), but there are no good roads from El Cocuy to San Gil, even though they are about 100-200 km away from each other.   Since we would have to go most of the way back to Bogota, just to turn around and head back up, we decided to split the trip and visit a small little town that had very little written about it except that it was beautiful.  High on hills filled with eucalyptus trees, our best guess is that Mungui is a town that thrives on Colombian tourists.  The restaurants and in-town hotels were expensive, but there was no infrastructure for gringo tourists.  We had our most expensive meal of the entire trip in a restaurant overlooking the town square (and the 3 century old cathedral), and finally found a little place outside of town in our price range.

In the morning, after our brief detour, we headed towards San Gil and spent most of today en route.  Any interesting adventures here will have to wait until the next post.  Take care!