don't you wish you were here?

Now that I'm about to head off on another trip to a tropical paradise, this seems like a good time to give you the lowdown on the last trip. A friend of a friend had contacts at a San Gil extreme sports company, and after he made his pitch we turned to another friend who's close friend actually lived there and could get us a much better deal. So what started out as a weekend trip with my housemates turned into a major deal. Here are most of us at the bus station:



We arrived around 3am and walked to Solé's house. We slept on a bunch of mattresses and couch cushions they had stashed around the house, and woke up to this house with various rooms and whatnot but an open courtyard in the middle. So it's like you're outside all the time unless you close the doors.



It also happened to be right on the town square with it's nifty park:



But since there were so many of us the foreigners ended up staying at a nifty hostel up the hill. The nice Australian semi-hippy that ran the place actually gave Olivier the idea for our next trip, which starts in about two hours. Here's the view from one of the rooms (which were perfectly adequate and not too sketchy given the perfect weather:



Of course, since there were 17+ of us, everything took forever, including getting our asses in gear to do stuff. So we amused ourselves by swinging in hammocks and doing coke:



Actually, I'm not sure what they're exchanging, but it must be illicit.

Our first activity was rafting, taking me back to my early teens when I used to go to summercamp in Colorado and spend a week rafting. Gotta love those helmets. And check out my swimming trunks! National colors of both the US AND France, perfect for our international crowd. Then again, that's what I got for buying trunks 20 minutes before leaving for the bus terminal.



We docked here. Note the weird tree:



After a delicious lunch of meat, we headed off to a beautiful colonial village where we wandered around for a while and had coffee. Here are (left to right) Noemie, Claire, Olivier, and Jaime. Does it look like a music video to anyone else? Olivier walking down the street, singing, with his possee backing him up, etc. Am I crazy?



And there was this fancy church, but it didn't turn out so well in photos. So here I got all artsy with b&w (n&b in Spanish and French, you philistines!):



We ended up in a bar that, had there been light, would have had a truly spectacular view. Apparently it overlooked a beautiful valley, but the sun goes down early in Colombia so all we saw was black. We had a few beers anyway though, exhausted from the rafting and meat. Here is Jaime, the Colombian dude who helped us so much at the beginning of our trip. Next to him is Solé, who really should open a tour company. She did an amazing job organizing the whole weekend for 20 people. And she's a killer dancer too. Later that night we went to a club and she won a bottle of aguardiente, Colombian booze with alcohol halfway between California wine and vodka. Or maybe they were just passing it out and her dancing on the catwalk was just a coincidence. We'd already passed around a bottle though so I was too busy dancing to notice.



But before we got to the club we had to leave the bar and find the cars. When we got to the main square (see the stair photo above) there was this band playing and a bunch of people dancing something called cumbia, if I'm not mistaken. Sorry, you guys don't get to see me trying it out. Here's a bunch of us plus the band:



The next day we went rappeling down an 80-meter (260-foot, philistines!) cliff. The problem though was that it takes like 5 minutes to do that, and we hadn't paid to climb back up, which I think would have been much more fun. It was really frustrating. Not that you care, especially since I was napping on a rock at the bottom instead of slaving away in an office. Here's the cliff. You don't get to see more ridiculous helmet + uncomfortable harness photos.



At about 7pm we went spelunking (caving), wandering through water and mud, wearing silly helmets and generally freezing our asses off. It was really cool to be wandering around these subterrainian passageways and crawling through nasty water. At one point the water was too high to get through without swimming, and even with helmet lamps it was slightly scary to have to go 15 feet under water. The guide went first, then pulled everyone through with a rope. I unfortunately volunteered to be the guy that helps everyone get a good grip on the rope (wrap it around their wrist), which meant I was the last to go through, twice (on the way into the cave and on the way out). So not only was I neck deep in water for 15 minutes each way, I had to hang out alone with my shitty lamp for about 30 seconds each time as I waited my turn. This is not terribly fun -- bats could have eaten me and no one would have known!

Sorry, no photos of any of this though. Like a bunch of idiots, we'd left our vaste stash of waterproof camera equipment in Bogota. God, we were really kicking ourselves that day.

The next day was supposed to be paragliding, but since the wind was really crappy only the four lightest girls got to go. And it wasn't even sunny. Since I'm still bitter, you don't get photos of them either. Fine, here's one:



Poor Olivier only wanted to go swimming all day but the guides promised there'd be a river nearby. We should have thought a little harder about that, since there aren't many rivers at the tops of hills. Way off in the distance in that photo you might see something that looks like a river, but I promise it was further than that. But it was so worth it! There were natural water slides, mini-waterfalls, pools of frigid water, and, above all, rocks to jump off! It was glorious. But again, no photos, this time since the photographer has flaked and didn't send any to me. Dammit.

And at some point, I nearly kicked Claire's ass. She started it though, then chickened out. And with fists like these, who wouldn't?



There you go, some photos and adventure for ya. More in two weeks.