Seth Kugel for The New York Times Chicamocha National Park in Colombia’s Santander province.
Six
weeks without seeing a familiar face can wear on any traveler, no
matter how warm and welcoming the unfamiliar faces are. So I’d been
looking forward to Week 7, when two close friends – my high school
classmates Jon Chapman and Doug Mollenauer – would fly down from the
States. The plan: meet in Bogotá and hop a seven-hour bus to Santander
province, known as Colombia’s adventure tourism hot spot, among other
things. (Among the other things: it’s Colombia’s roasted-ant-consumption
hot spot, but I had downplayed that aspect to them.)
Seth Kugel for The New York Times The Frugal Traveler with high school friends Doug and Jon.
Old
friends make the best travel companions. Their company transforms
monotonous bus rides into easy conversation: analyzing why none of us so
much as scored a kiss from our high school prom dates, for example, is
good for at least an hour. Also, there are few surprises: we learned to
tolerate one another’s flaws years ago. (Doug is always running absurdly
late, Jon overtips like a maniac, and I may – occasionally and
infrequently – emit the slightest of snores.)
We got off to a
frugal start at the Bogotá bus station, where I scored each of us a
5,000-peso discount ($2.82 at 1,800 pesos to the dollar) by playing two
neighboring ticket agents from rival bus companies off each other. Final
price for the seven-hour trip to Santander: 25,000 pesos ($14) apiece.
That
incident made me realize what new sets of eyes could bring to a trip.
Doug and Jon were wowed by my negotiating tactics, which had become such
a routine tactic for me in Latin American bus terminals that I hadn’t
thought to mention it in writing. Their fresh perspectives kept coming:
when the bus stopped for what I considered another monotonous lunch at a
roadside restaurant, Doug and Jon raved about the freshness of the
5,000-peso ($2.78) home-style meals – potato soup, chicken, rice,
lentils, salad and limeade. (Compared to your average American highway
rest stop, they were completely right, I thought.) They also gawked at
commonplace bags of mineral water you bite a tiny hole in and squeeze
into your mouth, and became perplexed when a sign at our hotel directing
travelers to deposit toilet paper in trash cans rather than flushing
it.
Seth Kugel for The New York Times Doug and Jon explore colonial Barichara.
Santander
has two prime tourist destinations, 40 minutes apart by twice-hourly
buses: San Gil, a bustling commercial town home to adventure tour
companies, night life and budget-style lodging; and Barichara, a
postcard-ready colonial village tucked into gorgeous hills and catering
to higher-end travelers.
Frugality seemed to indicate we would
stay in San Gil, so I had called ahead to reserve a private room (with
shared bath) for us at the well-regarded
Santander Alemán
hostel. It turned out to be a place full of good intentions – but
seriously lacking in amenities. And by amenities, I mean hot water,
toilet seats and doorknobs. Our cramped room cost us 17,000 pesos ($9)
each, and was worth not a penny more.
Those with budgets and risk
aversion less restrictive than ours can fill days around San Gil
crashing through Class V rapids on the Rio Suárez, rappelling down
waterfalls and paragliding into canyons. Our plan was to focus on (free)
hiking, so the first full day we hopped the bus to Barichara (3,500
pesos, or $2) for a hike to Guane, an even tinier, sleepier colonial
village about two hours – or four dozen irresistibly bucolic vistas –
away. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Jon, the least traveled
of the group, as he gazed across farmland to imposing mountains on the
other side and broke out his iPhone video camera for the first of
countless occasions. (We’d soon become familiar with his sign off:
turning the lens on himself, he would say “Of course, no video would be
complete without a shot of your handsome videographer.”)
Seth Kugel for The New York Times Santander’s traditional roast ants with Jon’s traditional trail mix.
Along
the way, we snacked on Jon’s homemade trail mix into which I had
insisted we dump about half a cup of hormigas culonas, the roasted queen
ants that the region is famous for. (Like most crispy edible insects,
they tasted to me like shreds of unpopped popcorn kernels.) And when we
reached Guane, we tried two other regional specialties at a little
restaurant called La Chinantoca: cabro con pepitoria (goat meat with
innards, 9,000 pesos, or $5) and carne oreada (jerky-like dried beef,
6,500 pesos, about $3.50). Doug and Jon, I was proud to see, were game
to taste anything local – yet another indication I had invited the
perfect companions.
Doug Mollenauer Negotiating for a better rate at the Posada de Pablo 2 in Barichara.
The
trip out to
Barichara also provided a fortuitous find: a new place to
stay. Just as the cobblestones turned to dirt on the road leading to the
Guane trail, we spotted a quaint sign: “
La Posada de Pablo.”
Ducking in, we found a family-run inn set around a modern but
colonial-style courtyard. (It was actually La Posada de Pablo 2, an
annex of the main branch down the street.) Amazingly, it boasted not
just views of the town center, but doorknobs and toilet to boot. Diana, a
daughter of the place’s now-deceased namesake, offered us two rooms for
a combined 110,000 pesos ($60). I talked her down to 100,000 ($55) and
we moved in for the next three nights. That undeserved reputation for
snoring won me the single room, but since we split the cost evenly, it
was a cross I was willing to bear.
Barichara became our base (and
the
Panadería Central Las Delicias on the town square our daily
breakfast stop and source for refreshing
guanábana
shakes), but the action still centered around San Gil. That is where
Patricia Salazar, friend of a friend and reporter for the local
Santander paper, took on the role of tour guide. (I had insisted that
our mutual friend not tell her I was a fellow writer, though I revealed
my identity when we left, landing her
a front page story.)
She
was a skilled guide, steering us mostly away from the backpacker trail –
as I had requested – but back toward it when it was worth our while.
Our first night, we drank in her favorite hangout, the Habana Cafe Bar, a
laid-back bar in the second floor of San Gil’s cute Camino Real mall.
When Doug asked to try a local drink, I proudly flashed a bit of
Colombian knowledge, suggesting a mixture of beer and rust-colored
Colombiana-brand soda called a refajo. Pati burst my bubble, insisting
that a true local refajo called for Santander’s local soda, cherry red
Hipinto. Touché. (Jon would later remark that Hipinto tasted “like cream
soda with a touch of hairspray.”)
Seth Kugel for The New York Times Rocks form natural whirlpools at Pozo Azul, a local swimming hole in San Gil.
Pati
was our hero – another day, she skipped out of work early, grabbed her
cousin Yeny and whisked us to the local swimming scene at
Pozo Azul,
where rocks form natural whirlpools that provide free back massages.
From there we walked to Bolos Pozo Azul, a bare-bones gaming center
along the highway with two important components: courts to play two
Colombian games called
bolos and tejo, and a refrigerator capable of
dispensing copious quantities of beer. We chose tejo, a game that mixes
elements of curling and horseshoes with the excitement of explosives. In
short, you take turns tossing a stone disc toward a tray filled with
clay, landing it as close to a metal ring as possible. A triangular
paper envelope containing a minor amount of gunpowder sits on the ring,
and if smacked just right causes
a minor, though extremely exciting, explosion.
We must have stayed three hours at least, so it was with trepidation
that I asked the bartender (really refrigerator-tender) for the damage.
She added up a very long tab (recorded under the heading “Gringos”) that
miraculously came out to only 60,000 pesos, under $7 a person. We
finished the night in the wee hours at
El Trapiche dancing to salsa,
merengue, reggaetón and the occasional international R&B hit.
We
did spend one calmer night in Barichara, giving Pati a break and as a
result, discovering our favorite restaurant of the trip: Iguá-Nauno, on
the edge of town at the corner of Calle del Mirador and Carrera 7.
Customers sat on tables in a semi-open courtyard dominated by the bar’s
gnarled namesake tree. We dined on snacks like patacones (flattened
fried plantains loaded with beef) and Colombian-style burgers (topped
with crushed potato chips), and ordered an off-menu drink: a lulada
(ice, sugar and muddled lulo fruit) spiked with rum. An ill-advised
second rounds of luladas broke the budget, and the meal ended up costing
32,000 pesos ($18) each. I was learning that traveling with friends may
eliminate boredom on buses, but it causes a severe hit to the bar tab.
Seth Kugel for The New York Times Whitewater rafting on the Rio Fonsi in San Gil.
We
pushed the budget a little further by deciding to brave one rafting
trip – the cheapest available, an 11-kilometer stretch of the Rio Fonce,
with manageable Level III rapids.
Well, sort of manageable. We
all ended up tossed from the boat on different occasions, but Jon
suffered the most, disappearing under the raft for nine scary seconds.
(We know this because we did a Zapruder-film-like analysis from the
video the tour company recorded from the shore.) He finally emerged,
shell-shocked but still in good humor. It could have been worse, he said
– those nine seconds had allowed only the K-12 portion of his life to
flash before his eyes.
Both Jon and Doug told me Colombia felt
perfectly safe – in fact, they were amazed by Colombians’ interest in
meeting travelers, a contrast to many countries they’d visited. “When
you go to a country that has not had a ton of tourism, people really go
the extra mile to reach out to you,” Doug said.
Seth Kugel for The New York Times The monument to Santanderian heritage in Chicamocha National Park.
One
particular afternoon stood out. It was our last day, and we made a
mid-afternoon trip to Chicamocha National Park, where the main
attraction is a cable car that dips into the canyon of the same name. We
also visited an unusual 2500-ton hilltop monument dedicated to
Santanderean culture and history, set on a huge slanted base
representing a tobacco leaf. As we puzzled over what the exploding rocks
could possibly mean, a uniformed police officer bounded over and
practically begged us to let him explain it in English. He launched into
a dramatic presentation that would have undoubtedly been extremely
informative, had it not been totally incomprehensible. But we were
touched at his effort.
By that time, night had fallen and we were
bracing ourselves for the unappetizing task of flagging down a bus on
the nearby highway for the hour trip back to San Gil. But to our
surprise, a man came over and offered us seats on the employee bus that
would soon be dropping off cable car operators and ticket takers in the
nearby town of Aratoca, where we could calmly wait at a safe bus stop.
We
climbed in with the workers and sped away, marveling at how unlikely
this would have been at Disney World or the Pyramids of Giza or the
Eiffel Tower, where travelers are essentially walking wallets. In
Colombia, for a while at least, we’re still real people.
