Constant Summer

Paul & Victoria's Travel Blog

Author: Paul Brantley

The (Way Too) Big City of Bogota

Yet another overnight bus ride and we found ourselves transported from the isolated, small town charm of San Agustin to the overwhelming, bustling Colombian capital of Bogota. We booked ourselves into an upscale hostel in the historic district of Candelaria, where most of the buildings date back to the 16th or 17th century. As the epicenter of tourism in Bogota, we expected it to be a little nicer, but instead found it mostly run-down, dirty, and unsafe after dark.

That said, we did see some remarkable things during our three day stay. Just a few minutes walk from our hostel was the Plaza de Bolivar, a huge square flanked by a gigantic cathedral, the presidential palace, the supreme court, and numerous other historic government buildings. It was sad to see many of these tagged with graffiti, though, which detracted from the charm and historical significance of it all.

We also visited Monseratte, an incredible cathedral overlooking the city from atop one of the huge mountains that tower over the historic district. To reach it, we took a tram that climbs slowly up a track at an impossibly steep angle, providing increasingly amazing views across the neverending city skyline. At the top, a walkway leads visitors along a series of 14 beautiful copper statues telling the story of Christ as he prepared for, and eventually faced, the crucifixion. The path ends at the foot of the cathedral, a simple, gleaming white building surrounded by walkways from which hundreds of people were sitting enjoying the view. Lots of selfie sticks were present. There was a mass going on inside, and we stood in the back for a few minutes listening to the booming echo of the priest’s sermon filling the cavernous interior. Following that, we walked a winding path through souvineer booths and small snack and lunch stands before taking the tram back down the mountain.  We had planned to spend the afternoon exploring some of the museums in the area but due to the national elections taking place that day, they were all unfortunately closed. It was probably due to the high altitude (almost 9000 feet), but we were feeling fairly exhausted and just spent the rest of the day and night watching Netflix on our tablet in our hostel room instead.

The next day, we took a day trip out of the city to the nearby town of Zipaquira, where we visited a very unique attraction, the underground Salt Cathedral. Built inside an old vacated salt mine about 600 feet underground, our tour took us through a maze of giant caverns carved from salt, with various religious displays and sculptures throughout. We were taken aback by the scale of the place, and the unfathomable skill required to build it. Soft religious music, glowing lights fading through various colors, and the cool, musty air lent a solemn tone, especially once our tour concluded and we were left to wander on our own through the tunnels and displays. It was unlike anything we’ve ever seen.

We returned to Bogota, made a quick dinner of breakfast burritos, and happily prepared for our flight the next morning into the Amazon jungle town of Leticia.

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Into the Colombian Mountain Towns of San Gil, Barichara, and Guane

Our escape from the oppressive heat of the Caribbean coast began with our first bus ride in South America, a 13-hour overnight trip. It started at the Santa Marta bus station, which was surprisingly nice, big, and had a lot of really good empanada stands. We had a couple hours to wait, and our bus company provided an air-conditioned waiting room with a TV showing The Voice (latin american kids edition), which was a great place to pass the time and eat a lot of empanadas.

Our bus ride was very comfortable, and to our disbelief, even had on-board, albeit slow and spotty, wifi. The first several hours took us through dimly lit towns and countryside in a large banana farming region, and then into winding mountain roads with lightning storms and periodic rain. We slept for a few hours in our reclining seats, then looked out the window for most of the early morning as we rode through impressive canyons deeper into the mountains before reaching San Gil around noon.

San Gil is a small city that sits in a canyon along a twisty river. It is famous for outdoor adventure activities like rafting, mountain biking, rappelling, etc, of which we did approximately none. We did, however, spend some time walking around the town, which isn’t too fancy but has a really nice central plaza, a couple of beautiful churches, and a lot of hostels and restaurants to cater to the large amount of tourists who are more adventurous than us. But our reason for staying in San Gil was its proximity to the perfectly preserved colonial town of Barichara, and its little sister, the nearby village of Guane.

We woke up early the day after arriving in San Gil and took a small bus about 30 minutes into the countryside to visit Barichara and hike from there to Guane.

Barichara sits on the rim of a wide, steep-walled valley. Apparently, it’s a popular film and tv location, thanks to the whitewashed buildings with red roofs, flat stone streets, 500 year-old churches, and a tree-filled plaza. It’s a town that is easy to get lost in, in a good way. All of the buildings and streets look very similar, but luckily we could spot the top of the enormous main church from pretty much everywhere we walked, guiding us back to the center of town.

The church towers over the plaza, with red-hued stone walls and a big bell tower. The inside was cavernous and decorated with statues and paintings on every wall. Only a few blocks away, we visited the first church built in Barichara, considerably smaller, with stone walls, a rudimentary wooden roof, and a fantastically intricate wooden reredos (which we recently learned is the name for the decorative artwork and walls behind a church altar – thanks wikipedia!). Next door is a cemetery with a wide variety of interesting gravestones. Ranging from very old and fairly new, some were carved with religious symbols, while others had more personal ties. One grave we saw was in the shape of a tree with a cowboy hat hanging from one of the branches. Another was in the shape of a soccer ball. The graves were very close together, making it hard to find an appropriate path to walk through. Outside the cemetery walls, a couple horses were tied to a tree, waiting for their owners. It couldn’t have been more charming.

Eventually, we found our way to a small restaurant where we had some delicious veggie burgers on fresh baked buns, alongside potato chips, some tiny carrot and celery sticks with mango sauce, and freshly-made blackberry and strawberry juice. The entire meal was just a few dollars each.

After lunch, we started our hike to Guane, the small village a few miles down in the valley below Barichara. The towns are connected by a stone “road” called the Camino Real. It was built in the 1700s to facilitate travel on foot and move livestock from the small farms down in the valley up to Barichara. It begins as a narrow, rocky trail descending down the steep valley walls below Barichara before leveling and widening out, with piled stone walls on either side. The scenery along the trail was breathtaking, with views across the entire valley, passing small farms with cows, goats, and chickens wandering all over. The entire hike, we didn’t run into any other people – the Camino Real was all ours, for a little while anyway.

A couple hours later, we arrived in Guane, a tiny village of only a few streets, a very old church and plaza, and buildings similar to the architecture in Barichara. Oddly, the town was packed, and it quickly became obvious that we had arrived in the middle of a political rally. We had been noticing billboards and posters throughout Colombia for candidates, but didn’t expect to get such an up-close look at one. With the tiny streets crowded by enthusiastic supporters waving flags and wearing campaign tee-shirts, a big motorcade suddenly rolled into town. It began with flatbed trucks carrying as many people as could fit on the back, blasting music and honking horns. Then, a fleet of supporters on motorcycles. Last, a police escort rolled into the plaza, surrounding a silver SUV. People ran alongside it, waving and tapping on the pitch-black tinted windows. It stopped at a corner where we lost sight of it, but everyone went into a large building so we assume the candidate got out there to deliver a speech.

With the commotion over, we figured it was a good time to head home. Just as we were trying to figure out how to go about that, a small bus pulled up. We jumped on, paid about a dollar each, and rode out of the valley, making a quick stop in Barichara to pick up more passengers, and then back to San Gil. We got a pizza that night and headed out the next morning for Villa de Leyva, another colonial mountain town about 5 hours south.

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The Jungle Beach of Parque Tayrona

Our shuttle took us four hours northwest, up the Carribean Coast to the fast-paced city of Santa Marta. While there isn’t much to see in the city, it served as our launching point for a trip to the most popular national park in Colombia, the jungle beaches of Parque Tayrona.

Getting to the beach in the park wasn’t easy. Our day started with a 45-minute shuttle to the park entrance. After watching a required orientation video (in spanish), followed by an informational lecture by a park guide (in spanish), we were finally able to buy our tickets into the park. Another quick shuttle ride took us to the end of the road in the park, where we began our two hour hike to the beach. We brought a minimum amount of clothes and camping supplies for two nights, just one big backpack plus two small daypacks. Nonetheless, it was a gruelling hike due to the extreme heat and jungle humidity.

The trail traversed giant boulders, with vines hanging from trees like a Tarzan movie, and eventually opened up to views of isolated, sandy beaches without a single person in sight. We took periodic, somewhat involuntary breaks to take off our backpacks, drink water, and try to cool down in shady spots. As luck would have it, we came to a clearing in the jungle where a random colombian guy (amazingly dressed in slacks and a polo shirt) was selling ice cream bars from a cooler filled with dry ice.

Just before reaching our destination beach, Cabo, a group of tiny monkeys jumped through the trees over the trail right above our heads.

When we reached Cabo, we payed for a camping spot and set up our tent in a grassy area under the shade of a palm tree. Then, we headed straight for the water. The Cabo beach is a small encampment of long, thatched-roofed covered areas, flanking a horseshoe-shaped beach with blue-green water and soft tan sand. The water was cool and felt spectacular after our sweaty hike through the jungle. We played in the waves for a couple hours, then grabbed lunch from a rudimentary restaurant only steps from the water. Given the isolated environment, the food was surprisingly good: sort of a rice vegetable casserole with a side of fries.

We got back in the water and stayed in until nightfall, just after 6pm.

Sleeping in our tent that night was far from ideal. The heat and humidity was suppressing. By 7am the next day, our tent had heated up to the point where we had to escape back to the water. After an hour or so, we got out and hiked back along a short trail to visit a nearby beach that was completely empty. There, we had some apples and breakfast bars and spent some time watching crabs ducking into their holes near where the jungle met the sand. Eventually, a few other people showed up and we decided to head back to the beach near our campground.

Our plan had been to spend one more night in Cabo and then retrace our hike back to the entrance of the park, but the prospect of another hot night in the tent followed by the extruciating hike through the jungle made us reconsider. Luckily, we were able to book a ride on a small boat at 4:30pm back to the fishing village of Taganga, where we could taxi back to our hostel in Santa Marta.

The boat ride was an adventure in itself (see video below). They crammed about 30 people onto benches flanking the sides of the open-air, janky boat, and loaded everyone’s bags into a small compartment in the front. My seat had the unfortunate “extra” of five large plastic gas cans stored at my feet, their caps sealed with produce bags from a grocery store.

The boat was very fast, but the ocean swells were sizeable, and the boat slammed up and down as we made our way along the rocky coastline. After a couple stops at small beach villages, where they amazingly fit several additional passengers on board, we finally arrived at Taganga. A short taxi ride later, we were back in our air-conditioned room in Santa Marta.

We grabbed some food, did some laundry in our sink and hung it in our room to dry, and hit the hay. The next day we stayed in our room until it was time to head to the terminal for an overnight bus south into the Andes, to the small city of San Gil.

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Bienvenidos a South America, and our first stop, Cartagena, Colombia

Our long trip through South America started with an overnight flight to Cartagena via NYC, arriving around 1pm local time. Walking off the plane felt like going into a sauna, with the temperature around 92 and 85% humidity. We went through customs, got our bags, and took a taxi to our first hostel, Hostel Mamallena, situated in the historic district just outside the walled portion of the old city.

The streets of Cartagena are buzzing with everyday people, traffic, vendors, horses, and tourists. Everywhere you go, you can hear music, though it’s not always obvious where it is coming from. Things are particularly chaotic along La Media Luna, a street mostly made up of small shops, restaurants, and hostels, including ours.

Inside the walled city, the streets calm down a bit, due to less traffic, but you never get away from the massive amount of people walking every which way. We constantly wondered, where are all these people going all the time? And what are they up to?

And all the while, it’s an inescapable oven.

All of this, however, is justified by the rich history and beauty of the old walled city. It was built by the Spanish beginning in the 1500s, with huge, cannon-bearing walls surrounding picturesque buildings. The city was the biggest port in the Carribean, shipping a majority of the gold that the Spanish were collecting from the native people across the continent. It was often attacked by pirates, hence the giant walls. All of this has been impeccably preserved, and walking around within this part of the city feels like going back in time.

While in Cartegena, we visited a history museum displaying a wide variety of artifacts from The Inquisition, including some torture devices that were used to punish anyone that didn’t follow the strict religious rules imposed by the Spanish. We also went through a gold museum containing a wide variety of pure gold jewelry and trinkets, as well as some urns and other ancient artifacts from the indians that lived in the area before the Spanish arrived. As magnificent as the city is, the dark history of violence here definitely stands out.

Our favorite time in Cartagena was walking around at night in the walled city. It’s like the whole place is having a party. Music everywhere, guys selling beer and street food on every corner, including on top of the giant walls, horse-drawn carriages clopping through the narrow cobblestone streets, flower-covered balconies, buildings in every color, groups of young people in elaborate traditional costumes playing music and dancing in tree-filled plazas – it all feels like something Disney would try to recreate.

The only land entrance to the city was defended by San Felipe Castle, which is basically a huge mound of brick and cement, covered with cannons, overlooking the city. Dark, low clearance tunnels run randomly through it, which were fun and a bit creepy to explore.

One day, we took a shuttle from our hostel to the nearby Playa Blanca, the nicest beach in the area. The water was perfect, very blue, and was so nice to get a break from the otherwise constant heat. The only downside was a small army of vendors walking along the beach selling everything from trinkets to raw oysters to massages, none of which we wanted. Sitting on the beach was an exercise in saying “No, gracias” constantly. So we stayed in the water as much as possible.

Our first food experiences in South America were great. It’s so cheap, and the quality of the food we were getting was impressive. Our meals cost only a couple dollars each. We had some plate lunches, street food (empanadas, meat skewers, corn on the cob), wraps, and even found a vegetarian restaurant serving a big lunch with soup, salad, rice, beans, and fried dough balls similar to a falafel. We also hit the grocery store a lot, which was pretty cheap and fun to browse around in.

After several days, we were ready to move on up the coast to Santa Marta and Parque Tayrona, a jungle beach paradise.

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