Small Town Colombia

Santander & Boyacá departments

By Heather & Pravin

October 24^th, 2017

la mesa de los santos

From Cartagena, on Colombia's Caribbean coast, we decided to head southeast to the Santander department. It was a long journey - a 45-minute drive to Cartagena's bus station, a 13-hour bus journey to Bucaramanga's bus station, 2 local buses and a decent walk to the regional bus terminal in a neighbouring town, and then one more 1.5-hour bus ride to Mesa de Los Santos.

As soon as we arrived at our lodging, Hostal Juan Palitos, we immediately knew that the long trip had been worth it. It was perhaps the nicest place we had stayed on the trip, and the vibe was incredibly relaxed with beautiful surrounding scenery. We spent the afternoon in hammocks, and then visited some of the neighbouring farms to pick up produce to cook dinner.

We started each day with a french press full of delicious Colombian coffee from the hostel's café, and took our time cooking up arepas and eggs. One day we visited the nearby Mercado Campesino, and sampled some of the regional food and even local beers from the market stalls. It was definitely more of a tourist market, but geared towards national tourists from nearby Bucaramanga, so it was quite interesting to see lots of wealthy families enjoying a day in the country. We also picked up a local pineapple, which are rumoured to be the world's finest. We can vouch that it was definitely quite delicious!

Another day trip that we took from the hostel was to the nearby Cañón de Chicamocha, which is one of the world's largest canyons and absolutely breathtaking to see in person. We took a 45-minute walk down a rural road to the town of Los Santos, where we received a great deal of stares as it seems tourists are quite rare in this town! While we were sitting in the square, many people came up to greet us and quite a few stopped by (with great pride and enthusiasm) to give us an update on how the Colombian cyclists in the Tour de France were faring. Cycling seemed to be incredibly popular in the area, as we saw a lot of people out on the winding backroads over the weekend. Leaving Los Santos, we headed down into the actual canyon, towards the town of Jordán, located at the very bottom. Originally we had thought that we might walk all the way down to Jordán, over 1000m lower, but the heat and humidity of the morning were quite intense and we realized that it would be quite painful to be walking all the way back up in the heat of the afternoon! We walked about 1/3 of the way down, admiring the views all the way, before coming back up, eager to get some popsicles back in Los Santos.

Picture Perfect barichara

From Hostal Juan Palitos, we took the excellent advice of the hostel's owner, and headed to his hometown of Barichara. It's a small, perfectly-preserved colonial town in the mountains, and we spent three nights there enjoying the surroundings. Barichara has a vast heritage of artesanías, and the town is filled with artists who have opened their workshops for the public to see and purchase their works. One of the highlights that we visited was a seniors' cooperative workshop, where elderly townsfolk come to spend the day working on handicraft projects. It's a really nice initiative that keeps older people engaged and busy, and they sell their beautiful work at extremely low prices since profits are only a minor goal of the project. Another workshop that we spent a lot of time exploring was the taller papel de fique, a workshop where artisans make paper products out of pineapple and hemp fibres. The workshop building itself was beautiful, but the gardens behind the workshop were almost more interesting, with a wide variety of plants that produce fibres which can be used for making paper products.

One day we took a walk to the neighbouring town of Guane, located a bit further down in the canyon. Nowadays there is a road for automobile traffic, but back in the day before motorized vehicles, a stone road was built to facilitate commerce between the towns and nearby farms. The views of the canyon were impressive, and the vegetation and birds surrounding the stone path made it even more special.

el Páramo de ocetA

From Barichara, we headed southwest on a 12-hour long series of 5 buses to get to the tiny village of Monguí. The area in the mountains above Monguí is known as a páramo, which is typically an incredibly wet watershed area filled with strange-looking plants such as frailejones, pictured below.

We contracted a local guide for the day, and arranged to meet her in the town's square at 7:45AM. There were a few others in our group, and together we hopped into the back of a truck which took us up into the mountains. When the road ended, it was time to start walking. The morning was misty and cool, and with every metre we ascended, the temperature dropped until we could no longer feel our hands. After a short while, it began to rain in earnest, and the spongy earth was quickly sodden. Despite our Goretex jackets and waterproof hiking boots, it wasn't long before we were soaked to the bone. Our guide was the only one who stayed dry, by wearing high rubber boots and a thick rubber poncho! Constantly trudging through water that was sometimes up to knee level meant that water was sneaking in and over our hiking boots, and the endless pouring rain eventually wore through all of our layers. The terrain was wonderfully weird and varied, and we saw delicate frailejones that were up to several hundred years old.

The day was quite long, and our destination was the Laguna Negra, where we had hoped to be able to break for lunch at the lake. Unfortunately, there was no pause in the driving rain, so we crammed some food in our faces and turned around to walk back via a slightly different route.

We have only hiked with a guide on a couple of occasions, but we were sure glad that we had done so this time. The trails were almost non-existent, and the thick grey clouds obscured all but the closest rise so that it was next to impossible to orient yourself among the rolling hills.

We headed back towards town, and as we got lower and descended out of the páramo, the clouds finally parted and we had the chance to begin drying off in the evening sun. Instead of taking the truck back partway, we walked all the way into town, and after about 10 hours of continuous hiking, we couldn't have been more excited to take a hot shower and have a hot meal!

Although the day was long and wet, the landscape was like nothing we had ever seen before and we were glad that we had gone to the very out-of-the-way Monguí to have the chance to explore the Páramo de Ocetá.