Guatape - Days 57-59
We thought about taking a day trip to Guatape like many people do but decided that we’d rather go to the town and stay for a few nights to have a more thorough experience. Plus, the bus there was 2 hours, so for a day trip it’d be 4 hours on a bus for a day, likely leaving us with only a few hours for a town that is supposed to be really cool. And people are always telling you what you do next on those day tours – I ain’t about that.
Getting to Guatape was pretty easy thanks to the metro – love that thing – we just got off at a stop in Northern Medellin that was connected to the bus station. The bus stations are usually half-mall half-transport; this one was no different but it was easy to find the bus company kiosks. There were something like 40 bus kiosks and usually only one or two of those serve a given town, so I wandered up to a lady wearing a uniform and said “Guatape?”. She pointed and said “dos”, so we walked over to kiosk two. Easy as you like. We bought our tickets for the bus leaving in “5 minutes” so we hustled over, grabbed some seats and waited for 20 minutes for it to fill up a bit more. Classic Colombia.
As we’d grown accustomed to, the bus ride was windy and pretty. We stopped at random places to pick up new riders and drop off others, but we made it eventually. The town was absolutely stunning – every single building was painted a bright color and they all had intricate paintings or designs next to the doors. On top of that it was right next to an amazing lake! Guatape is a bit of a tourist town, but for Colombian tourists, not us gringos, so there were only a couple hostels there. Ours was pretty neat with a nice common area and kitchen, but man oh man was the mattress uncomfortable! No squishiness whatsoever.
We didn’t stick around our room long and split to explore the town. We walked a block to the pretty main square which was packed with people and a big stage – apparently we were there during some celebration/festival! We hung out on the square for a while then walked along the lake and explored some other random colorful streets and tried to find some empanada place we’d heard of. No dice. Oh well, after some more walking, we stumbled upon a smaller secluded square down an alley that was full of people and tables on the street! Intrigued we grabbed a table and a bottle of wine and listened to the band that was performing. I decided to try to hunt down those empanadas again, this time with success! I bought a bag full of emps and went back to the square where the music had stopped and some street performers were warming up!
They started off with some juggling and we started off with some cheese emps – they were fantastic! As the juggler increased in complexity from balls to bowling pins to flaming sticks, we did as well, from cheese to beef to chicken. Some of the best empanadas we’d had really – juggling guy killed it too. Next up was a hula-hooping woman who worked her way up to like 6 hoops at one time. We were out of emps. After hula-ing for a while, she asked for a couple volunteers. When no one volunteered she decided that I would be volunteered. Damn it. It was me and one other dude with this crazy lady in front of everyone – first “activity” was lay down and do a push up while clapping hands. Naturally I nailed it as upper body strength is something that I work out at least annually. After that she told us to copy what she did, and she did the splits. Like come on lady don’t you see what you’re working with here? I spread my legs like I was stretching and called it good enough – the other guy was in the same boat though and the crowd got a kick out of it! Then she had us lay down with our heads touching so she could walk over us while juggling three machetes. Hooray! It was a bit nerve-wracking and I could hear Meg laughing the whole time but it went without incident, and then we were released from our “volunteer” duties. After watching one more performer we walked back to the main square where there was a concert going on, so we hung out there and watched but the music wasn’t great or English, so we walked back to the hostel to sleep on our mattress-rock.
End of D57 cribbage score: Ben 84 (12 skunks) – Meg 62 (14 skunks)
Breakfast today was yogurt and granola that we picked up from a little convenience store. We ate breakfast at the hostel and talked to a girl with an American accent. Nay, a Midwestern accent. It turned out to be a Milwaukee accent – halfway around the globe we met someone from our home city! It was crazy, so we talked to Melissa for a while before heading out for the day.
Our plan for the day was to rent kayaks and we’d heard of a hostel that rented them out, so we walked to the other side of town but the hostel only had one kayak (granted it was a double). We passed on that to try another rental place since I am terrible at cooperation with a double kayak, and the other place did have a few available! We moved the yaks down to the water and sunscreened up and happily paddled into the lake! We crossed the lake to check out a half-sunken boat which we later confirmed was the boat that sadly sank in the lake a month earlier with 9 people drowning :-(
The lake was actually a massive reservoir that we could only see a small fraction of from town so we spent a lot of the morning exploring the little bays that were offshoots of the main lake. It was very pretty and serene as there were no other boats or paddlers out there, and we eventually made our way back to the main lake. We crossed the lake back towards the town and decided to see if we could find a channel that would take us near El Penon – an absolutely enormous rock that dominated the landscape about a mile from town. We knew we were going to go there and take the stair to the top on of the days in Guatape, and figured it would make for a nice paddle, but all the bays that looked like they might connect to the water near El Penon did not, and the only way there was to paddle all the way around a huge peninsula.
It was lunch time and we were still kind of close to town so we paddled back for lunch, and left our kayaks beached as we walked to a lakefront restaurant. We wanted to try bandeja paisa for lunch and they had it here! We both ordered a plate and when they came we realized that one plate would have done just fine – it was a mammoth pile of meats – chorizo, steak, ground beef and pork belly along with an avocado, rice, beans, plantain and an arepa! It was ridiculous. And it was phenomenal. I finished mine and had a bit of Megs too, then we trudged back to the kayaks to paddle off our food coma.
We thought we’d maybe be able to paddle around that peninsula in the afternoon but the wind and waves had picked up against, and neither of us felt like fighting too hard to make it there, so we explored some more inlets and basked in the sun before paddling back in the late afternoon.
With still a couple hours of daylight and big plans for tomorrow we headed to the main square and grabbed a tuk-tuk to transport us to El Penon. The drive was pretty short but a bit hilly – we were definitely wondering if the tuk-tuk was going to make it up a couple of the hills! As we approached the rock it kept looming larger and larger – we could just make out the stairs carved into part of the rock. We hopped off and got a couple tickets to climb to the top and started onwards. Every 25th stair was marked with that stair number – there were 659 in total – and it felt like we’d been climbing for ages when we finally hit 300! We pressed on and made it to the top with spaghetti legs!
I like to think I’ve seen a lot of really cool views in my life – the top of Kilimanjaro, Delicate Arch at sunset, the Bosphorus Strait in Istanbul, and the Antwerp Christmas market come to mind – but this was probably the best view I’ve ever seen – the reservoir was massive and it’s shape was outrageous. We were there during the golden hour of sunset as well so all the colors and shadows really popped – it was quite outstanding. We did really, really wish the had a zipline or something to take down instead of stairs. We spent a while on the summit trying to find the perfect spot to build a lake cabin then took the stairs back down.
On the way down we saw Melissa again (she was climbing up and we met her around step 150 (good news for us, poor news for her) and we made plans to meet at the hostel for dinner. Once down from the rock we decided to save a buck and walk back as it was still kind of light out and the walk promised to be pretty. It actually was a neat little walk as we found a trail with a couple suspension bridges.
After some time hanging in the hammocks on the roof and reading until it was too dark, we met Melissa to grab dinner. Since it was a touristy town, the waterfront restaurants were overpriced and not great, and I’d read that the other hostel in town had a Thai restaurant inside, and I was craving some Thai! The restaurant was pretty decent – pad thai and drunken noodles were ordered but nothing wowed me (I made a mental note to order EE Sane the day we arrived back in MKE, as if that wasn’t already my plan). The main square was very dead compared to the previous night, it was Sunday night after all and we saw a steady stream of cars driving back towards Medellin on our walk from El Penon. With nothing going we headed back hostel-side and did some research for our next town.
End of D58 cribbage score: Ben 84 (12 skunks) – Meg 62 (14 skunks)
We met a dude back in Santa Marta who loved his time in Guatape primarily because he rented a motorbike for the day and rode around the countryside stopping in towns and checking out swimming holes. Yes, I thought, I want to do that. I will do that. Today we do that. We emailed Guatape motos a few days ago and reserved bikes. The owner seemed real chill via email – I emailed him asking if we needed to stop by the shop the last few days to pay a deposit or to reserve a bike. His response: “Nah man all good”. And it was all good, the owner, James, was an awesome dude from Denver a bit older than us – he showed us the bikes – we were using automatics which were pretty similar to the mopeds we drove in college only they went like twice as fast. He gave us a cheap cell phone to use in case of problems as well as a map and some advice, and we hit the road!!
Our first objective was to get to San Rafael, the next town up the highway. The roads were really windy but really fun to drive on, and we found a spot that we were told had a great viewpoint, so we parked the bikes and walked over to a cliff overlooking the next valley over – gorgeous!!
We continued weaving up the mountains until we made it over the pass, then we descended towards San Rafael. We made it to the little town in a little under an hour. We parked our bikes in the main square and got some coffee and enjoyed the sunny morning. On the map James gave us there was a little swimming hole marked, though we didn’t really see a road for it on the way from Guatape. Supposedly it was just outside of town, and I found something that looked right on google maps, so we went exploring!
We found a tiny town about 10 minutes back on the highway and turned off. It turned into a gravel road pretty quick, but we followed it for a long while, then saw a sign for it and followed that some more. We came to the end of the road, parked our bikes and walked through someone’s backyard to a waterfall area! The swimming hole was very picturesque and we wasted no time hopping into the cool water. I swam over towards the waterfall and verified that the water was quite deep, then we climbed the rocks to jump in! It was an awesome way to spend a few hours! We basked on the rocks after our swim and played game of cribbage before leaving. We coasted back down the gravel road until the junction at the highway where we stopped at a place with a “trucha” sign where we stopped for a beer and some fresh trout. Then we jumped back on the bikes and hit the gas. We drove past San Rafael and the roads became an absolute joy with gentle turns and elevated bridges above the jungle. We drove past a few areas where the road was mostly washed out by landslide and drove for at least an hour seeing maybe one or two other vehicles.
There was another swimming hole we wanted to stop at on the drive back, so we eventually turned around and did the same lovely drive again, stopping past San Rafael when we found a river. We walked a half kilometer and found a spot where the river slowed at a couple sand bars – this one was bigger and more crowded than the last spot but we still had a great time floating in the gentle current while looking up at the jungle covered mountains all around us.
After a fun and windy drive back to the bike shop James met us out front with two beers which we enjoyed while talking to him and his lady friend from Germany, listening to them tell the story of traveling through Colombia and falling in love with Guatape and eventually moving there and opening his own business. Back at the hostel we made mac and cheese with hot dogs for dinner and watched Jumanji on the kindle. Meg had never seen it before. She thinks it was scary.
End of D59 cribbage score: Ben 85 (13 skunks) – Meg 64 (14 skunks)