BIENVENIDOS A COLOMBIA
(Crossing Colombia Part 2)
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Bienvenidos a Colombia - welcome to Colombia or Bienvenidos a Cali or Bienvenidos a Popayan - we have heard that a lot on this trip. From a drunk that overheard us speaking English, a teenager at an outdoor concert, a person on the street to someone working in the tourist office, people seem genuinely happy that we are visiting Colombia. So far, so are we!
Cali, our first stop in Colombia is the third largest city and sprawls over a large area. We were there during the Feria De Cali (Cali Festival). Besides drugs, Cali has a reputation for fantastic salsa dancing. Our first day found us at a huge outdoor amphitheater where there was a dance exposition and thousands of spectators. Each group came up and gave a ten or fifteen minute performance. We saw some pretty impressive salsa and some great dance costumes. We attracted some attention from a few teenage girls when they heard us speaking English. We chatted with them for a while in Spanish and they seemed thrilled to pose with Lois for a few photos. Afterwards, we made it back to our room without getting kidnapped.
A river runs through Cali and we found it to be surprisingly clean. It was all decorated with Christmas lights. In addition to what we might consider traditional Christmas icons - trees, Santa Claus, archangels, snowflakes, they had a few that made perfect sense in the Colombian cultural context, but struck us as funny - beach balls, soccer balls, someone floating in a raft, etc. Even the typical Christmas motifs had a cartoonish feeling to them.
Walking around the colonial center of Cali we found a few nice buildings, but nothing spectacular. La Merced Church, dating from 1545, included an excellent archeological museum. San Antonio Church, up on a hill, afforded a nice view of the city and just how far it sprawled. La Ermita, rebuilt in 1940, was supposed to be based on Cologne cathedral. It didn't remind us of Cologne, but it was a great neo-gothic building.
From Cali, we travelled over rolling hills planted with sugar cane and then steeper mountain roads to Popayan. We saw lush, green countryside the whole way. We did pass through four military checkpoints, each with a large billboard saying, "The Colombian Military is working to keep the roads safe for you". In the case of our van, they just waved us through each time, although we did see them stop and checks some cars and trucks.
Popayan, known as "The White City", has all the buildings in the colonial center painted white. We ended up spending fours days there, in part due to transportation issues around New Year and in part because it was a very easy city to walk around. We spent some time playing with our new camera, as well!
Popayan had a large, green central plaza, as is common in Latin America. Unfortunately, unlike other plazas, there were no restaurants or cafes surrounding it. Instead, there were five banks and the church. However, the benches in the plaza were a pleasant place to sit and watch the world go by. Below are some of the typical scenes we see in most plazas.
We took a day trip to Silvia, a nearby town with Guambiano Indians who still wear blue and fuchsia traditional attire. The "bus" was a brand new Hyundai nine passenger van. Not exactly a chicken bus, although one of the passengers did bring along a box of chicks that we heard peeping the whole way. We spent the afternoon walking around Silvia, hiking up to the church overlooking the town and visiting a little park.
There are some hot springs near Popayan and we went to Aguas Hirviendas (boiling waters). It was a small family oriented place. When we arrived, we found one other friendly family on a day trip there. There were a few large pools and some smaller ones. The water varied from cold to lukewarm to warm to seriously hot to boiling. There is a volcano nearby and boiling water surfaces into a spring from which they divert it into the pools, mixing in varying amounts of cold water. After soaking in the water, going down the water slide, napping in the sun and enjoying the surrounding mountains, we found the whole day had gone by.
Leaving the hot springs, at 5:00 PM on New Year's Eve, we saw a very weird parade go by. It consisted of a few men beating drums, people dressed as devils, black beasts, Frankensteins and gorillas. They carried what looked like a life sized scarecrow dressed in old clothes. We found out this was sort of a goodbye to the old year and all the evil that accompanied it. People write down on paper regrets, disappointments, bad habits, anything they want to leave behind in the old year. They stuff these papers, along with firecrackers and gunpowder into the scarecrows. New Year's evening, the streets were empty and it was relatively quiet. We thought this was going to be a pretty boring New Years, but about midnight, everybody came out into the streets, with their scarecrows and lit them on fire - thus burning away the old year and all the negative things associated with it. That's when the real partying began!
New Year's day most of Popayan was shut down. We found where everybody was when we walked up to a viewpoint above the town. It seemed like half the population was there, enjoying the holiday and the view of Popayan. A rain storm rolled in and we managed to get some photos of the clouds before running for cover.
That is about all for this travelogue. Based on advice from the tourist office, we swapped Tierradentro and San Agustin in our itinerary. So, we headed out to Tierradentro - The Land Within - on January 2. That's where we first got kidnapped. But, that's another story.
A BELATED HAPPY NEW YEAR
Paul
& Lois
Salento, Colombia
January 10, 2010