It was a long day. We left our San Gil hotel--with our spacious airy room and the great hotel guy, Freddy-- and took a bus one hour to the nearby equivalent of the Grand Canyon--Parque Nacional del Chicamocha. I'm sure it's not as big as the GC, but it looks huge and has two rivers at the bottom creating not one but two gorges. We had hoped to do some hiking but it wasn't set up that way, especially not for only a few hours. So we succumbed to the 'teleferico' (an aerial tramway going down down down one side and up up up the other). The cable car ride was four miles long, from one rim to the other--one of the longest in the world, according to our brochure.
We were stuck on the other side for two hours due to maintenance work, but had fun on the return trip chatting with four guys sharing our cable car, who turned out to be old friends from grade school, now working for the Colombian military and enjoying a weekend reunion.I asked them the question I ask a lot of people, but I was particularly interested in these guys' response because of their profession: "What do you think Mexico should do to overcome its drug problem?"
"Professionalize the police and give them a lot of training, especially in counter-terrorism," was the main answer. They sounded very intelligent and convincing. I know from a colleague in Mexico that police are poorly educated, paid and trained.
Then we went to a sculpture in the park honoring the Colombian Revolution, designed and created by a Bogota sculptor and his team of 400 assistants in a period of three years. For someone as disdainful (or hostile, really) to nationalism as I am, I was surprisingly moved by the beautiful sculpted figures representing archetypal historic individuals fighting for Colombia's freedom 200 years ago.
Barry topped it all off by signing up for a three-minute zipline in the park, but I'd had enough adventures for a few days.
Then we caught another bus for another hour + to Bucamaranga, a city of about 1 1/2 million, followed by a taxi to the airport where we were to fly to Santa Marta, on Colombia's Caribbean coast. Colombia has several budget airlines and we flew one of them, Easyfly. The plane was 1 1/2 hours late, with no written or even oral advisories, so we were all sitting around cluelessly. When the flight did show up, the crew ended up having to order a replacement plane due to some kind of mechanical problem. At least we did take off, finally.
Another hour later, we landed at Santa Marta, the oldest city in South America. By now we had made friends with Jutta from Munich and Francesca from Alsace, France, so we all shared a taxi into the centro of Santa Marta. It was now about 9:00 p.m. On the drive into town, our taxi driver told us that the next day, the whole of the city would participate in a "Paro" (shutdown). All businesses and transport would stop as a protest against the corruption and mismanagement of the city government. With that news, three of the four of us decided to have the taxista (driver) take us on to the nearby fishing village of Taganga, where we had hoped to end up but not that night, since we were already tired. We dropped Jutta off at the hotel we had planned to go to, and headed off for Taganga.
Taganga wasn't far, but we spent a frustrating hour and a half going from hotel to hostel to hotel, looking for rooms and finding nothing, even though this is not theoretically the high season. The poor driver. Many of the roads are unpaved anyway, but after the heavy rains and flooding earlier this winter, you needed a 4-wheel drive to get through. He earned his pay that night.
Finally, worn out, we decided to drive back to the hotel in Santa Marta where we had left Jutta. She was sitting in the reception area and greeted us half-crying, half-laughing: moments after our taxi had left, she realized she had left her small backpack (with netbook and camera) in the trunk of the cab; she had been a bit freaked out realizing the street where the hotel was located, was swarming with prostitutes. None of us had noticed the extra backpack. Frantically she had emailed us, but had no other recourse, until, providentially, we returned.
While the taxi driver asked the hotel guy for some water, we all stood around laughing at the way the day had turned out and rejoicing that we all had a place to sleep. "God is blessing us all," I said to the taxista, as he headed home for the night.
The hotel rooms were cell-like and tiny, and we moved on the next day to a nicer hotel on a nicer street, but first we all went out for a beer on the beach. Never had a beer tasted so good!
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