Where the sun had been » Colombia

Santa Marta and the Lost City (Ciudad Perdida) trek

rbosinger — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 01:25:46 +0000

We took a bus from Cartagena to Santa Marta so we could go on the famous Ciudad Perdida hike. Santa Marta isn’t overally impressive from what we saw, but the hotel we stayed at was near the ocean and the sunset was amazing.

One of the major cool things to do in Colombia is the Ciudad Perdida trek. It’s basically Colombia’s version of Manchu Picchu: an old civilization ruin on up in the mountains in the jungle from somewhere around 5th Century A.D. It was only discovered in the 1970’s and for a while people were fighting over it before the government stepped in. I think it’s only been safe to go up there since the late 80’s, but even since 2003 there had been some cases of tourists getting kidnapped. It’s different now. In fact, almost every backpacker we ran into in Colombia had done this trek or was planning on doing it at some point. I think the only danger might be having a heart attack on the hike or going off the cliff on the crazy bus ride up and down to the starting point. Anyways, we decided to do this because it’s much cheaper than Machu Picchu and less touristy and heard of (although it could very well become the next Machu Picchu by the way things were looking). It cost us about $200CAD each for a 6 day, five night hike with guides that cook three meals a day and donkeys that carry out the hammocks and other essentials. The only thing you carry is your backpack with clothes and camera and any hiking gear you’d feel that you want.

Check it – I have uploaded quite a few cool pictures of this trek since I did this post. Check out my Flickr Photostream.

We got to see a lot of these types of views.

These donkeys are at least… two times as strong as I am.

This is one of several fruit stop points along the way. There are also several places where the indigenous folk sell Gatorade from small huts along the way. Unfortunately I would later lose the only pesos I brought along in a poker game and have no money for the sweet sweet electrolytes.

On the trek you see many real indigenous families who truly live off the land in this region. These kids spent hours swinging around on this vine. These people (as well as our guides) carry around a traditional sack of coca leaves and the alkaloid that activates them. Im sure it takes the edge off the trekking. These people often run around the trail barefoot and eat monkey.

We had to cross rivers. It was pretty extreme and I craved a Mountain Dew. This is an earlier picture, but by the end we just left our shoes on and walked right through.

There were ferocious beasts on the trail. This picture was taken moments before I wrestled this vicious panther to it´s death.

This is what the camps were like. This is the first camp and it´s the nicest. You can actually buy beer and other drinks here and the locals even carried up a pool table. The camps thereafter would not have such things.

A rather jungly view.

No jungle hike is complete without learning how cocaine is made! For $10 extra a former cocaine-making-man shows us how it´s done. My Spanish wasn´t good enough to understand everything he said, but luckily a member of our group translated some for us.

So from what I gather the process seems to involve getting some coca leaves and some gasoline and mixing it all up with other chemical shit in dirty buckets.

or you be Brianna and just start gnawing on the leaves. Please leave a comment if you think she looks like a giraffe-girl.

Almost there… just got stir it up a little (but not too much – really he said you can ruin a whole batch if you don´t know the art of the ´stir´

and filter our the unwanted dont-get-you-high junk….

and we have coca paste! This is almost the final product. After this point they basically just need to dry it out (and do one last filter). Apparently it was cool to roll cigarettes in it and smoke it or put it on your gums and let your face go numb. I tried a little and immediately killed someone.

Brianna tried a little and started swinging around on the vine like the indigenous kids.

She then stole an assault rifle from the army, said “I´m taking charge, bitches” and demanded they go find more coke.

Jungle bugs.

And I´ll end this post off with a few shots from the top…

Cartagena, Colombia and friends…

rbosinger — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 23:40:11 +0000

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything. In fact, we’re in Ecuador right now, but I haven’t done a single post about our times in Colombia. Hold onto your pantalones…

We flew into Cartagena from San Jose, Costa Rica at about 11pm, and we felt a little uneasy about that because everyone still seems to think Colombia is very dangerous, even though we read/heard different. Either way, it’s probably never the best idea to arrive in a foreign country you’ve never been to that late at night. We grabbed about $200,000 pesos (about $100 CAD) from the ATM at the airport and jumped into a cab.

The hostel recommended by Lonely Planet (Casa Viena) was full, so we were stuck to find another place to stay. Luckily, two fellas who were on the same flight were put in the same predicament and we all walked down the street together to another hostel.

We would end up hanging out all week with these guys in Cartagena. Their names were Carlos and Pär (from Spain and Sweden) and they were a bucket of laughs. It also helped that Carlos spoke fluent Spanish.

These pics were taken on their balcony the last day we hung out together, so now everything is chronocologically out of whack. Now I’m going to take you back in time…

Cartagena is an colonial style town. Part of the city is walled in. It’s probably one of the bigger tourist spots in Colombia, so we got hassled a lot by merchants, but we really liked it overall. I wouldn’t recommend going to the city beach. We got hassled so bad by people trying to sell sunglasses, necklaces, massages and seafood that we spent the entire time saying “No, gracias” and couldn’t even talk to each other.

Imagine this multiplied by twenty.

You try not to be rude, these people are just trying to make a living. However, when the 50th guy selling sunglasses approaches you within 30 minutes of being at the beach, you just start to ignore them.

We went to Volcán del Totumo on our second or third day in Cartagena. It’s basically a little volcano that spews mud instead of lava. You get to jump in there and try and wiggle around in the mud. It’s suppose to be therapeutic but it’s mostly just fun.

Afterwards you go down to the lake to wash off and standing in the water there is a group of local women to help wash you off. They basically beat the shit out of you. I tried to avoid it because I thought it would be awkward and they expect a small tip (which isn’t a problem, but we weren’t sure how many small bills we had on us) but she threw me into the water and ripped my shorts off and stuck her fingers in my ears. She got me real clean. It’s a really funny experience; Brianna couldn’t stop laughing (she also had her bathing suit ripped off). It was almost the best part of the whole thing, so if you ever go, let the women clean you off.

… or you could be like Carlos and say, ´why the hell would I pay money to jump into a vat of mud?`

Our hostel was in the Getsemani area of Cartagena which is where all the backpackers hostels are located. This is considered the grungier part of downtown Cartagena, but we liked it and it felt safe enough. The walled city has high class stores and hotels and a lot of cruise ships stop off and let people wander around there. There was a park right near to where we stayed (Hostal Real) that we walk through everyday as a jumping off point to go elsewhere in the city. We saw giant iguanas and tiny little monkeys in the trees right there in that inner city park.

Some of these guys were a few feet long. Next time I travel I think I’ll bring a small realistic looking figurine of myself to place beside the giant lizards, frogs and cockroaches in the pictures I take and and really freak people out.

Dogs find funny places to lay down around here. Sometimes they´ll lie right in the middle of a busy sidewalk and just tolerate everyone stepping over them. Every once and a while I´ll stop and check if they’re breathing. So far, they always have been. Dogs seem to have their on lives here in Central/South America. They walk around town like they´ve got jobs and errands to run. They even seem to stick to the sidewalks and obey traffic laws. There´s also very few places that care if dogs come in or not. You could be sitting having a beer at a small bar and a dog might just walk in… and buy a treat… a dog drove us to the airport in his taxi once… we paid him in Beggin Strips….. I´m lying now.

This monkey is eating a saltine that a man was feeding them. I would have liked to have seen him eat a giant turkey leg.

After a couple days in Cartagena we decided to go to Playa Blanca. This is a really nice beach near Cartagena that you can either get to by boat or by a series of buses, a canoe and then motorbike. Although the latter sounds fun, without fluent Spanish it tends to be worth it to take the easier route. Also, I think it only would have saved us about $5.

We walked to the harbor area at about 9 in the morning only to find out that the cheapest deal already left at 8:30 that morning. Buying a legit ticket involved paying a tax, and even though it still wasn’t that expensive (about $15 for the boat ride there) we still wanted to go cheaper. The thing is, once you’ve talked to other backpackers and find out that they managed to do something for $10, it’s hard to pay $15 even if the extra $5 doesn’t matter to you that much.

We bartered with the locals who were all trying to fill their boats up with people going to Playa Blanca. They take a different route and don’t pay the tax, so it’s cheaper (we paid $10). We got to leave from the big market/fishermans port instead of the harbor and take a small cargo boat. We had to wait around for them to find people to fill the boat with, but they also drove there 3 times as fast as the big boat we would have taken.

The market we left from. A man tried to sell me a Mach 3 razor while I sat in the boat. I tried to explain to him in my best Spanish that my reason for having a beard had nothing to do with not being able to find the proper razor. I laughed to myself as I imagined buying the razor and then desperately shaving my beard (and head?) in front of him leaving patches and bloody cuts.´Muchos gracias señor´.

The kind of boat we took to Playa Blanca.

is nice.

We slept in hammocks for about $3 a night.

The sun beat the shit out of me… and the rum…

Me y mi perra.

Ok, and here’s one more pic of Cartagena…

And now I’ll move on to the next post before this computer completely crashes on me…