Exhausted in Colombia

So we are at the end of our trip now. We are more exhausted than ever and really are not interested in seeing any of the tourist attractions anymore. We have literally seen two sights in almost a month in Colombia. But at the same time I don't feel too guilty because you see a lot of things about a country also when you just travel through it. Right? (ok. so maybe I do feel just a tiny bit guilty at the same time).

Things are made harder by the fact that we never seem to really fit in. We have actually felt it for most of the time since the beginning of our trip but it wasn't untin now that we really started to understand the reason behind that.
 It has been impossible to find the people that we really want to chill out with and the problem lies within ourselves. We are finding ourselves in a limbo between a European traveler and a South-American traveler. We don't really 'click' with any of the backpackers and tourists. It is firstly because they have plans and itineraries and time limits and that spark in their eyes that wants to visit every attraction possible - we have seen so many that don't really have it in ourselves to be amazed about many things because "there have been many waterfalls that were much cooler and many cities much more picturesque". And that is not really the best attitude for traveling because there will always be "better" things, you should just appreciate the moment at hand.  But mostly it is because they live in the hostels that you find on booking.com or bookinghouse or whatever they use (and they only leave them to take part of their excursions), that they pre-book in advance without ever venturing to the local hostels (that usually don't have a web-page at all) . The problem with these places is that the rooms are so extremely overpriced compared to local prices (local place is 5-10 dollars for a private room, a gringo place 6-10 dollars for a dorm bed, 25-30 euros for a private room in a "cheap" place) and the food is also at least double price (but not two times better). So we just refuse to stay in these places (everyone looks at us weirdly if we mention that the prices are too high. for them they are cheap. for us they are ridiculous). Plus these places also only allow you to consume beers bought from their bar (also 3x the price of the shop). I guess the poorer kind of European travelers just usually don't make it over the ocean and head to a cheaper areas of Europe.

We have a lot more common ground with the young South-American travelers,  but the problem is that as soon as they start speaking to each other we are out of the conversation because they start speaking Spanish way too fast and with way too much slang for us to understand (not blaming them. I wouldn't like speaking Estonian in slow-motion baby language for the whole evening either). Plus they never have money (they earn enough to survive every day and not a dime more by selling their handicraft or juggling on crossroads etc) so everything we buy goes to sharing between ten people (they share everything they have with us so it would be strange not to share back). It is fine short-term but long-term we end up spending as much as we would at the "gringo-places".  We,  of course,  feel an immediate connection with other bike-travellers but they are definitely the richer kind (have brought their big and expensive touring bikes from Europe) plus you don't meet them that often. But with them, the difference in wealth doesn't matter that much because we have so many similar experiences to bond over with. 

So with all that put together we are more tired of everything now than ever. And we usually still end up chilling with the Colombians and Argentinians.

Now getting to Colombia. Even though we had chosen the small jungle-border for entering the country, they weren't really impressed with us not having any legal documents (same old story).  So even though we were officially already in Colombia, we drove back to Ecuador and had a notaries office write us a document for 20 dollars that said that we have all the rights for the bike. It was as simple as that. No problems entering colombia the next day. Should have done that ages ago. Like 12 000km ago. 

So yeah! In your face, everyone who were laughing at us six months ago when we told them in Brazil or Bolivia that we were going to Colombia on our bike. Ok, so actually we didn't have much faith in the possibility of that journey either in the beginning. I think Peru was the first place where we actually dared to hope that it is possible to make it to Colombia. And it was.

Colombia for me is kind of like a mix of Ecuador and Brazil. Colombians love to party and love their drinks and drugs. The party starts on Thursday and ends early on Monday morning. They also love colours - there are many brightly coloured houses, clothes and bright-coloured anything anywhere. It has a very wide variety of people from descendants of Spaniards to Indigenous to descendants of black slaves - so a really colorful mix of cultures and races. Colombians are well-known for their incredible friendliness and welcoming spirit. We have not felt it that strongly because we already felt it a lot (if not more) in Ecuador. And Ecuadorian people were calmer and more reasonable while being friendly. 

So what have we been up to over here?
We visited San Agustin, which is a small town in the mountains. It is known for its ancient sculptures, which we visited mostly because we found ourselves staying in the town for almost a week. Didn't regret going to the sculpture park though. They were actually quite cool, most depicting some deities with a monkey-like face. The oldest ones were up to six thousand years old but most of them "only" one or two thousand. There was even an ancient couple shagging :D

One day in San Agustin I looked at maps.me and decided to just walk down a road that I saw on the map close to our hostel that seemed to go over a river. Well, about a kilometer in, the road turned into a narrow track which lead to an edge of a steep river valley. The view was just breathtaking, especially because it was very unexpected. I had no idea that our hostel was so close to such a spectacular valley. But that made me think - there are thousands of places like that. And for me it seems like a totally random choice, which ones have been marked on the maps and tourist guides as attractions and which ones are totally unnoticed. The waterfalls that just exist by the side of the road, with no name or any attention would be the biggest tourist attractions in another place (in Estonia for example). Thanks to that train of thought I know that our lack of visiting many of the "official attractions" really hasn't deprived us of much. as we have found heaps of breathtaking places just because we  venture to unknown places on our bike. 

Accidentally found a view

To continue our way we had to take a road that had 50km of the most horrible gravel in the middle of it. Most of it looked like it was old bricks kind of broken into pieces. Impossible to drive faster than 15-20kmph. The road led us to Popayan, which is a town on our way with almost all houses painted white and colonial-style. So the town itself was quite nice. Unfortunately the brightest memory of the town was not getting back into our hostel at night. So we ended up sleeping in long grass by a park and were woken up by rain. As a result, for about two weeks after that I was ill as well. It is strange to have a cold and a fever in a hot country, you can't really always feel the fever but just the out-of-breathness and chills. 

One of those waterfalls that was way too unimpressive for people to appreciate 

We also stopped in Cali for two nights but didn't even go to the center of the city. One of the reasons was probably because the traffic suddenly became horrible again. The buses and taxis are the worst. They just randomly stop in front of you, with no warning at all and block up the whole road. I think that they intentionally want to be assholes because to me it seems like a special effort to park diagonally across the road to block as many lanes as possible. Normal people are not that inconsiderate of other people. Unless you are a South-American. Then taking other people into consideration isn't even something that would cross your mind. (the friends that I have made in this continent AND are actually capable of reading this text, probably don't belong to that group, because with the language, they usually have obtained some understanding also of how the English-speaking world sees the world and a bit of the values as well)

Salento was also a sweet little town, very colorful and in a picturesque place in the muddle of valleys and hills.  When we had seen enough of the brightly-colored houses we decided that we kind of have to go to the national park close-by as well to see a 'palm-forest'. A 'forest' is maybe a bit too flattering of a name for the sparsely located palm trees. But the views were quite spectacular and the palms were the tallest that I have ever seen. Two tourist attractions in Colombia. Check. More than enough. (actually if we count in the towns themselves then we have visited more).

Coffee plantations

The tree is slightly taller than me... 

We also spent a few days in Medellin. Over there we even visited the center and used a cable car to try to go to a park on top of a hill (Medellin is very proud of its cable cars and advises all the tourists to take a ride). The top half of the cable cars was unfortunately closed for maintenance so we didn't actually get to the park. As a result we found ourselves in a less-than-nice neighborhood instead. Most of colombia has actually been pretty clean with very little trash on the ground. But if you accidentally make your way to the poorest barrios (neighborhoods) then the amount of trash and the smell are pretty horrible.

One night, when we expressed our disappointment in the most popular party-zone of Medellin (super high prices, music from each bar so loud thet we didn't even want to go close to them and drunk gringos everywhere) we were taken to an alternative party zone. It was the kind of place where you wouldn't wander even one bock into the sidestreets unless you have a trustworthy local with you. It was exactly like in some movies - gangs on streetcorner doing their drugdeals, prostitutes with extremely high heals and extremely big bottoms (I am still impressed that you can naturally have a butt that big :D), reggaeton blasting from every gangsta's car window, no cops to be seen anywhere. We were invited over to a crackhead's apartment for a visit as well. I just hope I didn't pick up a horrible disease from there when I tried to use the glogged toilet that had human feces lying around it.

It is astonishing how there can exist so big differences within the same city - the part for the rich and the gringos and the part for the poor people.

Our next aim was to make it to the Carribean coast and find a town to rest for a while. When we started reaching the coast we suddenly found ourselves in Africa. The reason is that the descendants of the African slaves have mostly made their life in this area. In the small towns that we drove through, I got a real feeling of being back in Kenya because of how the streets looked and also because 90% of the people looked totally and completely African(the rest of them were a mix of Hispanic and black).

We wanted to stop in Cartagena as well, as the old town looks very cool, being the second oldest Colonial town in the whole South America (colorful houses again but with much older style). But because we couldn't find a cheap hostel (didn't want to spend hours looking either as we were only going to stay for one night) and because motorbikes were not allowed in the whole island of the old town (cars are allowed though,  for some reason) then we decided that if the town does not want us, we will not stay.

At the moment we have made it to Taganga, which used to be a small fishermen's town. Nowadays, a big part of it has been taken over by tourists. There is actually nothing special here (the beach is small and unimpressive, the streets are horrible dirt and the houses are not picturesque either) but it serves our purposes well, as it is less crowded and cheaper than Cartagena, plus the location of the town is pretty nice - it is nestled between some cliffs.  And the sun sets directly into the sea between the cliffs that surround the bay... well not directly, it kind of fades away before it can touch the water, as it does in most places on this continent.

The town of Taganga

We are here to rest for a week or so, sell our bike if we can and just chill out. Fortunately there is enough of the local people left that you can get a cheap lunch from the side-streets and the town is small enough to walk everywhere. The plan is to chill on the beach and read a book and rest before heading back because after getting back to Estonia we should probably find jobs right away as we don't have much money left. So resting and doing nothing for one more time before coming back to Estonia and trying to sort all my life out.

Of course before we get to the sorting life out in Estonia we still have to make it to Medellin/Bogota for our flights back which will be several days of different airports and planes and security checks and so on. So after our vacation it is a total of at least a week of hustle and inconveniences.