Travel, Photography, Life.
El Cocuy National Park
A trip to a mountainous national park in Colombia.
Smalltown Colombian Life
Dec 18th
December 9-10, 2007
Days 744-745
El Cocuy National Park Trip Day 6-7
I started my bus trip back to Bucaramanga, but met a girl named Rosita who invited me to visit her family in a small town called Tipacoque. It sounded like an interesting side trip, so I went along and hung out with her mom, son, sister, and nephews. The town had no Internet, only one TV channel, and almost no vehicles, but there was a nice swimming pool for entertainment. My reception was practically royal considering that almost no tourists had ever entered their town. The only sad thing was that a woman with liver cancer died when I was there, which put the whole town in a sad mood. So I got a slice of the local life, both good and bad.
A Rainy, Snowy Lagoon
Dec 18th
December 8, 2007
Day 743
El Cocuy National Park Trip Day 5
I was up at dawn again and started walking as soon as possible to avoid the daily bad afternoon weather. Today, however, was cloudy and rainy from the beginning. At one point, the freezing rain was driving so hard into my face that I had to curl up behind a rock to wait for it to pass. I couldn’t see anything all morning.
After four hours I made it to my destination, a lagoon in the mountains. It was nice but I turned around as soon as I got there to try to get back before the weather got worse. But at the midpoint of walking back, the clouds suddenly cleared and I saw the mountains and glacier that had been hiding all day. I stopped and had lunch in an amazing valley surrounded by the beauty of the national park.
When I got back to the cabins, I finally met the owner and the rest of the family, who had come up for the day to decorate for Christmas. Although I was the only guest, they insured me that the place would be packed by Christmas with families from Bogotá. However, almost no foreign tourists ever bothered coming out this far from the cities. What a shame.
I originally had planned on trekking around the park, but the detour around the damaged road would cost me two days, and I didn’t have the food or the motivation to spend more than a week there, so it was time to head down. On the way back to Guican, I got lucky and got a ride in the back of a truck. I jumped on a bus right away to Soata, where I spent the first night of my trip. If all goes well, one more long day on buses will get me back to Bucaramanga.
Drunk with Pleasure
Dec 18th
December 7, 2007
Day 742
El Cocuy National Park Trip Day 4
I got up at first light today and left the relative comfort of my tent for the freezing cold conditions outside. Last night’s rain turned into a sheet of ice that covered the fly of my tent this morning, and I had to huddle close to my stove while I was cooking breakfast to try to warm myself up. Too bad I got rid of most of my warm clothing when I finished mountaineering in Bolivia. I started walking as soon as I could and shedded layers along the way.
The path I was following up the side of the mountain was full of hoof prints, but it didn’t look like any people actually walked on it, especially not by themselves. As I continued walking, the clear skies and strong sun warmed me up quickly. I passed lots of horizontally-layered rocks that I was told were once covered with snow before the affects of global warming took over. Now there’s just a thin strip left, which I was determined to reach.
After several hours of walking, I reached the snow line, but I couldn’t see any path heading that way. The altitude started to get to me at that point as I felt drunk and found it hard to concentrate on anything. I had gone way higher in Bolivia but never had problems with the altitude because I had been acclimatized properly. I stopped and looked around for a few minutes and eventually spotted a few rocks stacked on top of each other on a high plateau. I figured that must be the path and headed that way, despite my soroche.
Getting to the top of the plateau required a bit of climbing, but I managed it with my long legs. From that point on, there was no more path per se, but every now and then I spotted a rock pile to guide my way. The problem was that sometimes the “piles” were only two small rocks on top of each other, which could’ve easily been a coincidence. But if I seemed to be lost, I just kept heading up and eventually found my way again.
After several hours of walking uphill, I finally made it to the point where there was only snow. It was an incredible place surrounded by mountains, lagoons, and of course lots of snow. The silence was deafening as there were no other people or animals for miles. But I knew I had to head down once the soroche got bad enough that I couldn’t walk without stumbling around everywhere and the clouds started rolling in and blocking my view of the way back down.
I had barely started my drunk-walking downhill when the fog got so bad I could only see about twenty feet in front of me. Suddenly those rock piles 100 feet away weren’t helping to guide me at all. I stumbled my way along the rocky terrain awhile longer but saw no signs of the path. At one point I stopped and squinted at the clouds for several minutes, hoping for a clearing. Suddenly, I thought I saw a house way below me, so I couldn’t have ventured too far from the path. When I got back to the point where there was some vegetation, I realized that I must have bypassed the plateau entirely and figured out where I had to walk to find the path. It took about eight hours round trip to get back to my tent.
The owner’s wife made another appearance this afternoon, but she still wasn’t saying much and had a horse to take her down to her house tonight. It looked like it would rain again, and I didn’t want to have to cook outside in the wetness again, so I caved and stayed in the cabin. Even not having anyone to talk to, I kept my mind occupied by making a fire and was in better spirits by bedtime.
The Early Milk Truck
Dec 18th
December 6, 2007
Day 741
El Cocuy National Park Trip Day 3
Everyone I talked to yesterday, including the park ranger, the refuge owner, and the owner of my hotel told me that the milk truck left at 5:30 in the morning, and could drop me off near the refuge. I began looking for the truck at 5:15, bud didn’t see it. I was surprised to see a few people standing around so early in the morning, and they gladly gave me the bad news: the truck already left at 5:00. Since when did anything happen early in South America? So the list of adversity continued to grow: first the bad information on the park’s access point, then my food poisoning, followed by the damaged road, and the lack of maps in the park ranger’s office yesterday, and finally the early milk truck. Everything was going against me.
I walked back to the hotel to think about a decision. My only choices were to wait another day for the next milk truck, cut my losses (again) and head back to Bucaramanga, or walk to the top. Normally I’d walk to the top in an instant, but I was without a map or even decent directions, I had barely started eating again and still didn’t have much energy, I wasn’t acclimatized to the altitude and would have to walk up another 1000 meters, and of course I would have to carry my heavy backpack to get there. Still, waiting around a town as small as Guican for a whole day by myself would’ve bored me to tears and I had already come so far, I didn’t feel like giving up at that point. So my decision was made. I’d take my chances and walk to the top.
The lady at the hotel claimed there was only one road, but of course, the road split into two almost right away. Eventually I found a farmer who showed me the right way. There were a few farm houses dotting the road, so I was able to get updated information for most of my walk. The landscape where palm trees gave way to pines and eventually no trees at all reminded me of what I had seen in Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador (it was really incredible now that I think about it), but the people were different. I had never seen so many tall, white-skinned, blond-haired, blue-eyed “natives” in my life. The walk was indeed more difficult than it would have been had I been in good health, but I still made it by mid-afternoon by taking my time.
The refuge I was walking to consisted of three Swiss-style cabins and a couple small administrative buildings. The only people around were the owner’s wife and son. The Colombian tourists were supposed to start showing up in about a week for the Christmas holiday, and it was very rare to see a foreign tourist there, despite the fact that the park was listed as one of Colombia’s highlights in the Lonely Planet. I put up my tent and tried talking to the owner’s wife, but I only received one-worded answers to every topic I tried to bring up. Soon she informed me that she was sick and was going to take her son down to their house. I was then the only human around.
I’m sure the area was beautiful, but a thick fog had blanketed the region by midday and refused to go away. The constant cold wind made sitting outside unpleasant, so I walked around a bit, but quickly headed back because I couldn’t see anything anyway. I was happy when it got dark at 6:00 because it meant I could cook supper and go to bed, but that’s when the rain started. At first it was just a thick drizzle, like the clouds were trying to empty themselves, but soon it turned into a heavy downpour. I was attempting to cook under the overhanging roof of one of the cabins, but the deck was built further out than the roof extended, so the water ended up splashing all over the place. Soon I was freezing cold and soaking wet, and getting back into the tent was a great pleasure. But my tent had taken some damage in more than a year of heavy usage, and the water started soaking through the barrier of the fly. I started to think I was cuckoo for going to Cocuy.
Guican, One Day Late
Dec 18th
December 5, 2007
Day 740
El Cocuy National Park Trip Day 2
I took the first bus out of Soata this morning at 7:00 AM. It was another terrific journey as we went higher and higher to the point where I caught my first glimpse of snow in Colombia. But the trip felt a bit like deja vu because we kept stopping in small towns that all looked identical and the bus driver must have only owned one tape because we kept listening to the same five songs over and over again. We got to Guican, the last town before the park, after seven hours on what some authors would call “Bone Crushing” roads.
The military police stopped us along the way, which made me feel secure because their presence meant that there weren’t any paramilitaries in the area, but I seriously doubted their methods. They only made the men get off the bus and searched us thoroughly, but they did nothing to the women and only gave the bus itself the once over. So the men weren’t carrying any weapons, but the bus could have been filled with drugs, guns, and bombs and the military would have never known. The same thing happens in dance clubs where men get searched, but women, who are the ones carrying purses that could easily conceal weapons, don’t. I don’t see how this sexism could possibly be effective, but I’ve been told that the area is much safer than it was a few years ago. It’s better than anarchy I guess.
Eduardo had a friend who owned a refuge at the edge of the park, and I learned that he had been expecting me when I called his this afternoon. But surprise, surprise, there was no public transportation that could take me up there until tomorrow. It would be possible to walk, but I’m at high altitude again (3000 meters), and the refuge is another 1000 meters up from here. On top of that, I still hadn’t seen a decent map of the park as even the park ranger was all out, and there likely would be dozens of different paths crossing each other with absolutely no indication of where they led as is the norm in South America. Also, after I ate lunch I looked white as a ghost and nearly passed out, and seriously doubted my ability to do a difficult walk carrying a 20 KG backpack. But at least I could eat.
The photo album for this entry is here.
Trouble on the Road
Dec 18th
December 4, 2007
Day 739
El Cocuy National Park Trip Day 1
I was up early this morning and got a taxi to the bus station in time to catch the 6:00 AM bus to Malaga. It was a long ride over beautiful terrain where we constantly headed up and down the area’s peaks and valleys. We stopped for breakfast which normally means rice, eggs, and fried beef for the locals, but I got a few arepas (heated pieces of thick bread), and to my surprise, I felt a sensation I had not experienced for several days: slight hunger.
We got to Malaga a bit later than expected, but I was still making good enough time to make it to the park tonight. I shared a taxi with a few locals to Capitanejo, but that’s where the fun ended. In Capitanejo, I learned that a landslide had made the road going forward impassible. To add insult to injury, this just happened yesterday, so if I hadn’t gotten sick, I would have made it through on the cheese truck two days ago. I could either cut my losses and head back to Bucaramanaga or make a major detour by taking a different road around the damaged section. I chose the longer route.
I took another bus to the small town of Soata, but that was it. There were no more buses today. The damaged road only cost me a day so far, but I’ll probably have to take the same detour back. So after thirteen hours on buses, I made it a grand total of forty-five miles from Bucaramanga as the crow flies. The only consolation was that I was able to eat a plate of lentils and rice for dinner tonight, my first full meal in four days.