Today, Richi, owner of the Fly Site Hostel, was going to take Kathleen, Mark, myself, and a guy from Spain, whose name escapes us, to Chicamocha Canyon National Park where a tram, or gondola, would ship us from the one side of Chicamocha Canyon to the other via a trip down to the bottom and back up. Kathleen and I had passed this park on our way into Bucaramanga.
By mid-morning we were heading down to Florida Blanco. We stopped at a gas station and found most of the attendants were young women. Some wearing shorts, while others wore more conservative attire. All were easy on the eyes. Kathleen asked Richi if this was a marketing strategy to which he replied “We stopped for gas didn’t we?”.
We continued on up a mesa which topped out into farm land and gated communities. Richi said during the violent days of the drug cartels, places like mesas were considered safer than most other communities because only one road accessed the top. Many of the gated communities banded together and hired their own security forces. Indeed, we passed one guard who was very heavily armed and looked like he could handle himself quite well.
We traveled through gently rolling farm lands and went by some very nice houses. Richi said many people from the U.S. have vacation homes here and judging by the eclectic assortment of houses, Kathleen, Mark, and I concluded this was abundantly clear. Richi commented that since the drug cartels have become less of a nuisance, more people from the U.S., and other countries, have moved to Colombia, bought land, and built houses to use for 3-4 weeks a year.
We arrived at Chicamocha National Park around 11:30am. Richi sent the four of us off on the tram to the main attraction of the park. The gondola ride was actually quite impressive. Kathleen had read the tram was less than a year old. For the next 20-25 minutes we rode down into and up out of Chicamocha Canyon.
The canyon is considered one of the largest and deepest on Earth. Vegetation on the canyon walls reminded Kathleen and I of habitats we encountered in Baja, Mexico. Tall cordon cacti among acacia, and all covering rocky dry slopes. The Chicamocha River had carved out the canyon over the course of several hundred-thousand years. Give or take a week or two. And, the work is still in progress.
We arrived at the main portion of the park. Kathleen and I have visited a number of national parks throughout the world. We have found that national parks in South America near metropolitan locales or main highways tented to be more, well, err, tourist trappish. Parque National Chicamocha Canyon was no exception. The gondola dropped us off at a well maintained set of buildings including shops, restaurants, a corral of ostriches and chickens, and a museum all dominated by this huge piece of art work.
At first glance you’d think the art work was a depiction of turmoil and reckoning after the Earth was struck by an asteroid. Well, actually, the bronze figurines among the fondue’d rocks were depicting the uprising of the peasants toward the Spanish and the ensuing revolt towards taxation and the Crown. Sound familiar? In the U.S. we just had a bunch of guys dressed as Native Americans chuckin’ boxes of tea off a ship into Boston Harbor.
We all four had lunch in one of the restaurants and wandered about a bit. Mark and the Spaniard headed back via the gondola.
Kathleen and I went to the upper most part of the park for some photo opportunities of the canyon before our gondola ride back.
We arrived back at the other side of the canyon and Richi hauled us about the mesa some more before heading off back to the Fly Site Hostel. We arrived back at the hostel where Kathleen and I followed Richi’s suggestion, while he harrassed his cat, Camila, that we arrange to fly to Cartegana rather than take a bus.
The bus ride would take 12-hours and cost about $120 USD for each of us. Using the internet and following Mark’s suggestion about a cheap airline –EasyFly – Richi got us a flight from Bucaramanga direct to Cartegana for a shade more than the bus ride. We would arrive in Cartegana an hour after take-off. Kathleen, Mark, and I spent another pleasant evening sitting by the fire looking over Bucaramanga and Florida Blanco, Colombia.
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