I am back in Saint Louis and have uploaded the photos to my picasa album to the links below.  As I am no longer traveling, I will not be updating my blog.  Please check back later or follow my Facebook status to see when I have my next adventure!  Take care.

http://picasaweb.google.com/krcrouse/Colombia

http://picasaweb.google.com/krcrouse/ElCocuy

http://picasaweb.google.com/krcrouse/Apia

http://picasaweb.google.com/krcrouse/Pereira

http://picasaweb.google.com/krcrouse/Acaime

First, to recap – San Gil (and several of the towns surrounding it) claimed to be the Tourist Capital of Colombia, though I didn´t find it quite as exciting.  It was a very large town on the Rio Fonce.  It had an active and pleasant central square, but the town was built up a bit more than I would have preferred, and much of the town entirely ignored that it was built riverside.  The hostal we stayed in, for instance, was on the river itself, but had nothing that allowed you to really even see the river, let alone drink your coffee or beer while overlooking it. There was a small walkway along the river at the north side of town, but opposing the river on the walkway was one of the major thoroughfares.  The next town upriver, which we only saw upon leaving, seemed much more akin to my expectations – a small town centered around the square and the town cathedral.

Despite the lost possibilities of the town itself, there are a tremendous number of activities that can be done when using it as a base.  There was rafting (both on segments with Class 1 and 2 rapids, or 3 and 4), ziplining, hikes, kayaking, and several other sports.  About 1 to 2 hours to the north is one of the reputably best places for paragliding in the country, near the Chicomocha canyon.  We drive through this area on our way back here, and it was breathtaking- equal to El Cocuy in its dramatic landscape.  Whereas El Cocuy was hill after rolling hill until you reached the snow line, and then small little ice coated peaks, the Chicomocha canyon were single ranges from the river at the bottom to the top.  While the max elevation is less than El Cocuy, the maximum ascent is probably much larger.  Now that we have taken this route, I can see why there is no road that connects El Cocuy from Bucaramunga.

We did take advantage of the many activities to do in San Gil, but as time was limited, we only chose one – HydroSpeed!  Essentially, you have flippers and an extremely thick boogieboard, and you go paddling down the river with a guide in a kayak.  We went down the same river with class 1 and 2 rapids as the rafters, and saw one raft during our trek.  The HydroSpeed experience turned what would have otherwise been a rather dull, Hoozah type rafting trip into a much more fun trek.

Now that we have recovered from our overnight bus ride from San Gil to Medellin through Bucaramunga, we have one day left to explore the city before heading off.  Take care!

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!

For the last two days, Selby and I have been wandering around Bogota, the sprawling, altitudinous capital.  It is 2630 meters (8629 ft)  above sea level; to give you a comparison, the tallest peak in the Great Smoky Mountains is 6643 ft.  Although it does not have a fancy elevated metro system like Medellin, they have an intriguing and expensive mass transit system consisting of double-length buses on dedicated lanes that provide express service through most of the city and local service for special “zones.”  It takes a few minutes to figure out, but it occurs to me that it is inexpensive to build and reasonably effective.

We stayed in the historic central area of town, which boasts most of the civil attractions (like the parliament, mayor’s house, and presidential palace), as well as theatres, coffee shops, and, as the book describes, the center of student and “intellectual” thought and discussion of Bogota.  We didn’t pick up on a lot of political discussions, but we did wander down the street and into a massive festival in one of the central squares.  Apparently we had arrived in Bogota on the day in which they set up the city Christmas tree and all of the Christmas lights in the city!  There were people selling a mulled tea (with or without alcohol), breads, meats-on-sticks, cotton candy, lighted toy helicoptors, light sabers, clay dragons, ….. and the list goes on and on.  As we left the main square (which had a concert and occasional televised commentary) and headed up the main avenue which was also completely full of lights, we saw mimes, street-show acts, a guinea pig race, and a couple rappers spitting in a secondary plaza.

As we woke up and left the hostal today, we found that, it being the last Sunday of the month, many of the main streets were shut down and dedicated to pedestrians and bicycles.  Some major roads that were separated by medians had traffic flowing in one direction on one side and pedestrians on the other, and the opposite direction traffic would travel along the next major street down the grid.

Aside from the historic center, we also went far to the north side of town, which has become the upscale center, complete with elaborate shopping malls, expensive cafes, and plenty of discos.  Some of the houses were in brick-gingerbread style like we see in Saint Louis, and there were plenty of mostly-glass office buildings and large, gated apartment complexes.  For one of our more expensive meals of the trip, we stopped to eat lunch at a little creperie there.

Now, we are planning to head for Sierra Nevada del Cocuy, the highest mountain range in Colombia.  I doubt I will have internet for the next few days, but expect to hear more when we return to civilization.

I have just emerged from the cloud forest, and I am sorry for not writing earier!  For the last two days, Selby and I were hiking near Salento, a town near Pereira, in the central of the Andean mountain ranges of Colombia.  A jeep took us the 9km outside of Salento the Valle de Cocora, which is composed of small plantations comprised of wax palms and grazing cows.  Following a delicious lunch of trout and a plantain chip the size of our plate, we hiked through the Valle and into the Acaime National Reserve.  As soon as you leave the cultivated private fincas (essentially, plantations), the dense cloud forest overwhelmed us.  Through the trees, we could see the imposing peaks of Los Nevados national park, one of the places in Colombia that contain equitorial glaciers.

We stayed at a simple station in the Acaime National Reserve, which maintained that part of the forest- with a quirky and funny woman who could neither read, write, or do basic math.  I could hardly understand a word she said as her dialect was so thick.  When I asked her to speak slower, she spoke louder and with the speed.  Selby had more luck understanding her, and I was greatly amused when she said that when she travels to other parts of Colombia, the locals there can´t understand her.  We were the only people who stayed at the reserve, and so we had an entire dorm of 20 beds to ourselves.  If we went sufficiently up the hill, we could get cell reception, and she asked us (and paid us) to call her friends in Salento so that she could talk to them, usually in 3 minute spurts.

When we left this morning, we continued to a lookup a couple kilometers (and a 30% slope) above the station, before hiking back out to the Valle.

Now I shall fill you in on what has happened since I last posted (and I´ll apologize for not having a post inbetween this one and the last, but we had to take an earlier bus than I expected).

On Sunday, Selby suggested that we cook lunch (the main meal) for Lucy and Tia Chava, since they had been cooking so much for us and were so kind.  We also considered walking to a nearby town (Sentuario) and then taking a jeep back.  When we asked for information on how to go to Sentuario, Lucy and Chava were very worried because we would be walking for 10 km, which is not that much for us, and quite a bit less than the 15 km we hiked in the Ozarks a month ago.

Nonetheless, they continued to try to steer us away from taking the walk.  In the meantime, as we worked out the details in what we would cook for them, we realized that we wouldn´t have time to both go to Sentuario and cook lunch for them, and so we decided to stay in Apia and make a Thai-style coconut curry, which we thought they would not have had before.  And so, before breakfast on Monday, we went to the local market and bought a coconut (since canned coconut milk was not available), and during breakfast announced that we would make lunch for them (armed with internet recommendations on how to make coconut milk from coconuts, which is not the liquid inside!).  It rained several times during the morning, and at each instance, Tia Chava came in and told us to start walking to Sentuario, and was entirely pleased with herself for joking with us about it.  In the end, our chicken coconut curry with Colombian ingredients turned out very well, and Lucy asked us for the recipe so that she could (maybe) make it for her friends.

Tuesday was spent with Carlos Mario, who owns or manages a farm with dairy cows and whose brother is a mining engineer.  (Cousin) Carlos knows his family and suggested that since Selby is a geologist, she would like to see the local manganese mine.  Carlos Mario picked us up and headed off to the the mine after stopping to pick up an old crazy friend of his.  The mine itself wasn´t open, and so we prowled around the machinery and the premises for a little while.  One of the funnier characters that we met, Carlos Mario repeatedly apologized for being hung over because he and his friend had just made a 42-million peso deal to sell their dairy products and had been out late celebrating.  That didn´t stop them from having us make a stop on the way to the mine to drink beer and play billiards.

On Wednesday, after a very excellent steak lunch, Selby and I left Lucy and Apia and went to Pereira, where we stayed with Cousin Ruben downtown.  Diana (Carlos´ girlfriend) met us and took us for a long walk around the town and to her university.  Afterwards, we met her father, who loaned her the car, and then returned for dinner with Ruben.

I believe that gets us up to date.  If all goes according to plan, we will go to Armenia this evening and then take a night bus to Bogota, and I will write more late this weekend.

During the weekend, the country people come into town to sell their produce and buy wares for the week, and thus it has been a bustling place so far.  Assuming I remember, I will comment later on how things change during the week.  People are extremely warm, and, surprising in contract to most small towns in developing and middle-income countries that I have visited, not very distracted by my foreignness.  Selby and I don´t draw very much attention, and we have rarely been approached by locals.

Gloria and Lucy´s families date back to the very beginning of Apia, over 100 years ago, and it seems that they are an institution in the town.  Last night, when we were in a small market, one of the workers asked us how we learned about Apia- when I told them about mi prima Luz (Lucy), he commented that her family is well known and well liked by the other villagers.

In other notes, we visited a coffee exporter that consolidates and sells the local coffee from the area.  He was recently Starbucks certified and does work with Green Mountain Coffee Company in Vermont, among others.  We saw the stocking house, which contained bins for Organic Coffee, Fair-Trade Coffee, Starbucks Coffee, Regular Coffee, and something I couldn´t translate and wasn´t concerned about as the bin was empty.  I asked what the difference was between organic and fair-trade and which he thought was better, but I couldn´t entirely understand his response.  He served us some of their coffee, roasted while we were there, and it was fantastically smooth and tasty.  I read that my coworkers replaced me with a box of donuts, and if not for that, I would have tried to bring some back.  Allegedly, the greatness of Apian coffee comes from the high concentration of manganese in the area, and if the schedule works out we may be able to visit one of the mines this week.

Carlos runs a monthly band in Apia for the country children who come to the town on the weekends to sell their goods, and early this morning we walked with him and a group of them about 5km out of town.  We ate some fruit along the way, and stopped when we arrived at a river.  After a few minutes playing on the rocks, one of the children jumped in and began trying to walk up stream and then float down stream.  Many of the other children joined in, and the rest of us wandered around the pasture and spent time under a gigantic tree.  It was getting on towards the time for mass, and so Carlos called back to Apia to send a jeep to pick us up.  The jeep arrived, and many of the children climbed onto the top or hung from the sides for the ride.  I, as you might expect, hung off the back  for the full on view of the universe.

On the drier, academic side of the world, I am cautiously asking about politics and economics, but don´t have enough to make a fair commentary yet.  More on this to come.

Most of the time since my initial post has been spent traveling.  Selby and I left her apartment at 3:45am on Thursday to catch the metro to the airport for our 6:00 flight, arrived at the Medellin International Airport around 3:00pm, and reached a guesthouse (hospedeja) around 6:00pm, after spending an hour getting our cell phone unlocked.  We borrowed an older AT&T phone from a friend, knowing that the protocol that AT&T and T-Mobile use are also used by most of the rest of the world.  For US$2, we can get a chip that allows us to use the phone natively in Colombia; however, we first have to get the phone unlocked from the AT&T network – an ordeal that cost almost as much as the cheapest new phone available.  Regardless, we did it, and we have it.

Medellin is a beautiful, massive city in a valley surrounded by tall mountains, and we had to snake down from the airport 30km away into the center of the city.  The inital vistas were fabulous, and the first portions of the city we entered were upscale and full of shopping centers, bars, and eclectic restaurants (the Asian resturant along the highway is a notable example).  At this point, except for the clay-ceramic shingled roofs and the Spanish signs, it wasn’t that far off from what you might have expected in the USA.  The city was clean, the other vehicles were in good repair (and included such models as Chevy, Hyundai, and Toyota), and our bus was climate controlled and seemed to be a recent model.  It wasn´t until we got closer to the center of the city did we go through more heterogenous neighborhoods that appeared to be poorer than you would expect from back home. 

From our hospedeja, we took the metro to another area of the city with more shopping and restaurants and walked around until we found a restaurant that met our liking.  The cook was extremely genial and seemed thrilled to offer us course after course: soup, the main course, a sweet, coffee, and tea- all included in the plate of the day.

Today, after checking out of our hotel, we again took the metro to the bus station, took a large, fancy bus south to Pereira,  about 6 hours away.  Cousin Ruben (Gloria’s brother) met us at the station and put us on a minibus to Apia, the family home.  Lucy had arranged for him be at the terminal for the transfer, and Selby and I were amused that they didn´t think we could find the ticket booth and the subsequent bus to get to Apia by ourselves.

We finally arrived in Apia around 6:30pm, and Cousin Lucy (Gloria’s sister) met us, fed us, and has taken us in for a few days.  We are staying in the family house, just off the square in the center of the village.  Although we arrived after dark, we can see that the village is built on the top of a mountain, and the roads have a much steeper slope than, probably, any town I have been in in the USA, including San Francisco.  I will write more about the views in the future.

Initial Impressions of Colombia

There are several things that strike me initially about Colombia.  The people are extremely warm and friendly, are willing to put up with me piecing together Spanish words and pronouncing them incomprehensibly over and over again, and are more than willing to help.  To this point, I haven´t noticed any significant attempt to jack up prices for the foreigners, and prices seem similiarly mostly fixed, as they were in nearby Nicaragua .  It has also been a surprisingly clean country, and the roads in Medellin and major highways between state capitals are reasonably wide and kept in very good repair (expect the road construction in which they were repaving them). which is a significant divergence from Nicaragua.  It occurred to me that this is an especially impressive feat, as only a small portion of the trip was on anything resembling flat land, and the roads were often carved into the mountainsides.  Although we saw a set of buses that were lower quality than the ones we had taken, they would have ranked highly in Nicaragua and much of Asia.  In fact, Colombia most closely mirrors Malaysia in infrastructure, cleanliness, and ¨standard of budget traveling.¨

So in short, after two days spent almost entirely traveling, things are fantastic.

We leave on November 19 and will return on December 8 – nearly three weeks in a new country and on a new continent.

We expect our general route to be an interior loop, starting in Medellin, heading South to visit Cousin Gloria’s family in Apia, over to the Tatacoa Desert, Bogota, and up into the mountains.  Let us see whether that pre-itinerary is met.

Kevin