What can you do with three weeks in Colombia? A lot, it turns out, even after spending a week in Cartagena taking a weeklong intensive Spanish course! One of the appealing things about Colombia is that its sheer geographic diversity (beaches! mountains! rainforests) mean that you have have many mini-vacations-in-one, depending on how much you move around the country.
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Getting to Barichara
As I've touched on in posts before, there's an inherent masochism to travel. Heavy food, uncertain showers, bad night's sleep — who knows what we might encounter when we leave the familiar comforts of home? And then, if you're like me, there's the willingness to do things you know you won't find comfortable in part because you want to get to the final destination and also because you're curious to see the space in between the destinations, where the land changes from flat to mountainous, who travels the same route as you, what it looks like along the way.
I didn't do a ton of research before coming to Colombia, but the small amount I did pointed me to a walk you could do between the towns of Barichara and Guanes, in a region called Santander, on an old road built hundreds of years ago that was still maintained. Rad! But when a week ago I started plotting out how to get to Barichara from the north of Colombia, I saw that it wasn't going to be an easy feat. I did look into flying (being traumatized from some particularly long bus and train rides in SE Asia), but when I calculated the numbers of hours I'd spend changing planes and still riding a bus, it didn't seem worth it. So a bus it was, and a foray into my familiar masochistic travel mode it was going to have to be.
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The Paradise of Palomino
As I've touched on in posts before, there's an inherent masochism to travel. Heavy food, uncertain showers, bad night's sleep — who knows what we might encounter when we leave the familiar comforts of home? And then, if you're like me, there's the willingness to do things you know you won't find comfortable in part because you want to get to the final destination and also because you're curious to see the space in between the destinations, where the land changes from flat to mountainous, who travels the same route as you, what it looks like along the way.
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Hola from Cartagena
If you've ever read anything by Gabriel García Márquez, Cartagena is just how you'd picture the places in his stories to be: hot, sultry, and charming as can be. For starters, there's the colonial, sometimes crumbling Spanish buildings crammed into narrow, winding streets, all painted vibrant shades of blues, greens, purples, whites and pinks. Then there's the sounds of salsa and champata emanating from the buildings, mixed with the cries of children playing, the shouts of fruit vendors, and the occasional car honking its horn as it tries to make its way through the mix of tourists and locals meandering by. It's sultry but relaxed, vibrant but not overwhelming.
It is the perfect place to start one's vacation.
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