Camera once broken now lost

The camera I struggled to fix last week was lost while horseback riding yesterday. We spent the last week on the beach in Canoa and a couple nights at a rather isfunctional organic farm. Unfortunately most of the photos from this period are gone forever.
Currently, we're in Quito to purchase a new camera and continue on our way...

Goodbye Colombia.

After leaving Popayan, we headed down to a city close to the Ecuador border called Pasto. While we intended on spending a couple days there, we changed plans and just stayed one night before continuing on to Ecuador to a town called Otavalo. Before crossing the border we did stop at a church outside of Colombian border town Ipiales, famous for its unusual construction. The church was built a little less than 100 years ago across a gorge, with the main cathedral built against the gorge wall where an image of the virgin had supposedly appeared. The construction was impressive, it was a beautiful day, and after our taxi driver fixed a blowout remarkably quick, we were on our way to the Ecuador border.

Crossing the border came with the expected long line for passport stamps, and angry Germans refusing to pay for the visa extension they failed to get in Colombia, before they attempted to exit the country with an expired visa. Kadie and I however, had jumped through all the necessary Colombian hoops, so our exit was simple, and we were happy to receive a six month Ecuador visa with no problems...

After crossing the border we headed straight to the tourist town of Otavalo. Otavalo is famous for its outdoor artisan market, and it is an excellent example of how locals have created a major tourist attraction out of selling traditional style handicrafts. While this sounds great, the place is overrun with tourists, and many, if not most of the goods for sale at the main marketplace are imported from outside Ecuador and then labeled as traditional artisan work. Vendors swear synthetic fabrics are wool, making them pretty difficult to trust, and often you're told that obviously machine made products are local and handmade. But this is their chief source of income in a relatively poor country, so you can hardly blame them. Some stores do sell higher-end handmade products, but these are at a much higher price, but are much higher quality. With all this in mind, it's still a nice town (albeit cold and rainy when we were there) and the market is impressive in size and volume. In addition to cruising the markets, we visited a couple of other small towns in the area, and a local raptor park with Condors, Eagles and an impressive flight demonstration. Fortunately, we also stayed at a wonderfully peaceful, farmhouse hostel out in the country side which had horses and four of the best dogs we've ever met, all ridiculously large Argentinan Dogos. (think giant pit bull)

Before leaving Otavalo, I also did an early morning hike out to some local lakes for some great views of the surrounding area.

We left Otavalo after a few days of cold, wet weather, better prepared with some cheap Ecuadorian rubber boots, and headed for Quito. With more wet, cold weather we visited a few sights in Quito over a couple days and headed to the coast hoping for sun and warm weather.

When we arrived in the pacific coast town of Canoa, we found the warmth we wanted, but unfortunately, being in the wet season, there is still a considerable amount of rain. The town is known for its mellow surf break, but mostly we've spent the last few days drinking cocktails on the beach, fighting vicious mosquitos at night and feeling slightly awkward around the enormous number of Americans and Europeans in this tiny town. If the rain lets up today, I'm looking forward to getting out on a surfboard, but if not, maybe tomorrow. In the meantime, we're trying not to scratch our dozens of mosquito bites and looking forward to heading out to an organic farm on Monday to learn how to fish for river shrimp, make chocolate and milk cows...

The Biggest Semana Santa Celebration in Colombia

We left Cali and made the short bus ride to Popayan to begin a long weekend of Semana Santa celebrations. As we travelled the couple hours down the Pan American highway we saw a dead dog recently torn into pieces in the road and a car accident with two dead bodies laying in the road. While our driver for this journey was remarkably well behaved by Colombia standards, this carnage hardly inspired confidence in road safety...

Popayan is a very beautiful city, with a surreal atmosphere, particularly in the main plaza, due to the fact the most of the main city is painted white. The ethereal plaza was blinding in midday sun, but unfortunately this was muted by afternoon rain, throughout our stay. The city is home to the largest Easter celebration in Colombia, and the presence of presidential candidates, TV reporters and thousands of people definitely reinforced this reputation. However, the actual festivities were pretty controlled and basically consisted of religious music concerts (all at high costs) or nightly processions. As neither Kadie or I was interested in coughing up $20 to hear religious music we pretty much planned on watching the nighttime processions. As could be anticipated, the processions were solemn, but surprisingly lacked music or dirges. The few bands that participated in processions, particularly the police band, was ridiculously out of tune, and played the same song over and over, every night. Aside from the processions and pretty buildings, Popayan is pretty dull as we found out during our four day stay there.

What was impressive was peoples' dedication. They were obviously in great pain as they carried immensly heavy, several hundred year old wooden floats on on their shoulders. And the crowds' willingness to watch these floats carried around town in processions that took at least 3-4 hours to complete was impressive. Here is a brief day by day summary:

Thursday, Day 1.
Kadie and I line up near the beginning church (which changes nightly) and watch a couple floats go by. Because people are walking alongside the floats we decide we should join them in search of another viewing spot in town. Unfortunately, we failed to realize that the people walking in the streets are accompanying a particular float and must carry candles for the duration of the procession. Additionally, because the streets are all blocked off, once we began walking it was very difficult to get back out of the procession. Feeling awkwardly out of place, we walk in the procession for about 12 blocks, get refused exit by a girlscout with a stick, and after being scolded by a priest with a large wooden cross we finally get back into the regular crowd. We retreat to a local bar with an excellent elderly dj playing  romantic argentinean  songs on vinyl. Kadie realizes that $0.50 hot dogs are pretty gross, I realize that $0.50 arepas with condiments are pretty gross as well.

Friday, Day 2.
We successfully find empanadas de pipian (potato empanadas with peanut sauce) and grandilla del queijo (a special sweet passionfruit served only during semana santa in Popayan), both are quite tasty. The nightly procession is much longer and it takes almost two hours for all the floats to leave the starting church. With a different strategy, Kadie and I wait until there all gone and position ourselves at the ending point of the procession to hopefully catch all the floats at the end of the night. Unfortunately, about a half hour after the last float leaves it begins pouring rain, forcing all the floats to b-line back to church for shelter. This created a surreal atmosphere of panic as thousands of people seek shelter, floats are covered in plastic, and men in extreme agony rush to get a giant wooden crucifix into shelter. Kadie and I get soaked and decide to just walk down the middle of the empty streets in our t-shirts back to hostel. As we do this the crowds along the sidewalks cheer and heckle us as we´re the only people foolish enough to try and walk through the torrential downpour through flooded streets. This may end up being the strangest experience during our entire trip..

Saturday, Day 3.
Aside from visiting the beautiful National Orchid Show, and Colombia´s largest collection of taxidermied birds at the Natural History Museum, the day is pretty relaxed. Expecting a big party to celebrate the resurrection, we find the streets strangely empty and the procession very short (but with much better music). Evidently, the crucifixion is a much bigger deal than resurrection.

Sunday, Day 4.
No easter eggs, no bunny. Just empty streets, closed shops and a day of rain.

After this we decided to head to the archeological site Tierradentro in southern Colombia known for the hundreds of tombs built into the hillsides. While we got a couple nights of good sleep in a tiny rural town, and manage to go on a great hike in the morning, my camera breaks and unfortunately, I lost a bunch of photos...
The tombs were very interesting, but after seeing about a dozen of them, we're pretty much ready to be on our way to Ecuador.

Broken flash card

Please ignore the Flickr account for a couple days. My flash card got corrupted and I had to dump a bunch of images to Flickr before I had a chance to sort through them.

Soaking in the Coffee Region's Hotsprings, and a Town that Loves It's "Trucha"

After Manizales Morgan and I decided to head out to the countryside to enjoy a stay at one of Colombia's many thermal resorts. We choseTermales de San Vicente as they provide a more natural resort environment instead of the big swimming pools and crowds. We pretty much had the pools to ourselves and I enjoyed a variety of strange spa services that left me picking tropical fruit out of my ears, and mud and sand out of my hair. Unfortunately, the lack of temperature monitoring left many of the pools too cold to soak in, or with one of the pools in particular - the chance of boiling ones self alive seemed likely. But- this ain't the U.S, and nobody is trying to prevent self-inflicted injury.

After a dust covered jeep ride back to civilization, we caught a short bus ride to Salento, passing a Palm Sunday processional on the highway exhibiting all the gusto that one could expect in a country that considers the entire week leading up to Easter a holiday. In Salento, we discovered more American tourists than in any other city we visited combined, and an over abundance of well fed, overly friendly dogs of the German Shepard and Chow Chow variety - I'm not sure if the two are related. Salento is also a big producer of farmed trout, or "trucha", and pretty much everywhere had trout signage, pictures, and crafts. Apart from petting dogs and making nostalgic foods with another American (by the way - chocolate chip cookies are extremely difficult to make in Colombia) Morgan and I visited the beautiful Valle de Cocora on two of the days. The first trip to the Valle, we decided it was time to introduce Morgan to the joys of sitting on a horse. We were lucky on our first day and enjoyed stunning scenery of lush Andean foothills dotted with the freakishly tall Wax Palm tree. Our horses were surprisingly undilapitated, and even more so, they were viciously competing with each other to be in the lead, so it kept them going at a rigorous pace. On our second day, the weather was a little rainy, but we enjoyed a 4 hour hike up to the lookout areas, and then spent a beautiful descent surrounded by clouds, palm trees, and tiny wild orchids.

With Easter soon arriving, we left the cool moist climate of the coffee region and headed to the hazy warm valley home to sugarcane plantations, lulo trees, and Cali. Though Cali is touted as the nightlife and salsa capital of Colombia, we experienced none of it as we basically used the city as a one night stop-over on the way to Popayan. We did however, visit the local zoo which housed a good variety of local animals as well as a number of large cats. The idea of going to a zoo always seems more appealing than the reality of seeing all of the miserable animals. Unlike the Portland zoo, the animals at the Cali zoo were actively attempting to claw their way out, which really increased the feeling of guilt for being there. Also, watching a large grizzly bear roll around panting in the muggy heat before picking at his pile of tropical fruit is a dismal site. Other than the bears, pumas, cougars, tiger, and lions (including four lady lions), the zoo had a lot of freaky birds and reptiles, and a lovely and stuffed to capacity butterfly enclosure.

Other than the zoo, we spent our one afternoon resting and eating ice cream in preparation for our journey to Popayan for the Semana Santa weekend.