The High and Lows of El Cocuy

After three days of long crowded bus rides and complicated transfers of moving about in Bogota, we were all big-citied out.  We looked on the map and not too far from Bogota, we found a national park called El Cocuy.


In Colombia there are lots and lots of National Parks, many of which are just lines on a map, with no roads to lead you there, nor any infrastructure of any kind.  These are, you could say, inaccessible.


El Cocuy is, on the other hand, accessible.  From Bogota, you can travel the 400 - 500 km in only 13 hours.  And since only about the 30% of the road has either fallen down the mountain face or been covered up by rockslide, you have a better than average chance of surviving.  And once you arrive in the village of El Cocuy, you still have a 25 km upward hike (~ 6 hour hike) before you reach the edge of the park.  (Or if you arrive early enough, you can ride with the milkman at 6h30 in the morning).  More accessible than this in Colombia : not likely !

When you enter the park, you're already at ~ 4.200 meters.  Other than a volcano in Guatemala, I'd never been this high.  Pauline had never been within two thousand meters of this altitude !  So after a long night on a bus followed by a long day hiking uphill at 4.000 m with little water, my body suddenly quit without warning.  In a span of three minutes, my head started hurting and my hunger diminished and my strength left me.  A bit later, I vomited the contents of stomach, including every grain of rice from the one spoonful I had eaten that day.  I had the soroche !  This was my first encounter with altitude sickness and it is definitely not the way to start a hiking adventure in the mountains.  But all I'd need was a good night's sleep...


Around 9 or 10 at night, it started the rain.  Now I'd slept under my tarp-tent hundreds of times and I know that when it rains, it's a good idea to move to the center of the tent.  Anything that touches the tent walls gets soaked.  I was a bit too foggy and groggy to bother to tell Pauline about adhesion.  Thus when her sleeping bag brushed the tent, she let in the rain.  Now, her sleeping bag is really warm, so she didn't feel the cold and the rain until about 20 L were lying on the groundsheet or inside her sleeping bag.  So my soroche was not the lowpoint of the trip, it was sleeping in a freezing puddle of water.  We switched positions and sleeping bags (I wasn't sleeping anyways), and I think Pauline finally got some warmth and rest.

Pauline with the Dutch.

In the morning, Pauline, my soroche, and I started the descent down to the cabana, where most of the hikes begin.  Despite the descent, I moved like I was ascending Everest.  Two steps, rest, two steps, rest.  Several hours and very few kilometers later, we reached the cabana.  There we met Erik, the Dutch guide, and his two Dutch clients, Elske and her dad.  We spent the evening talking to them and learning about Colombia and about the park.  And since we were planning on walking the same direction as them, Else and her dad invited us to join them for the next day's walk...an invitation we certainly accepted.  By nighttime I was feeling much better, so Pauline and I re-set up the tent and had our best night of sleep so far in Colombia.


The next day, the five of us set out on the trail.  Within 20 minutes, we reached the first of several small lakes, called lagunillas.  After 40 minutes and a few more lagunillas, we left the trail.  Erik assured us that it was the route we were taking was much drier and had better views.  After all, he'd been to this park 21 times !  So we followed.  Up the mountain, 4.000 m and climbing.


- Once we get to the top of the valley, Erik says, it's flat all the way back to the cabana.


After four hours, we reached the top of the valley (more like a cliff), and we started the flat return trip.   Hmmm, what's are those rocky mountains, steep walls, chasms, and marshy lowlands doing up here ?


- Well, it's not flat right here, Erik says, but just after this little section it gets flat, I've been here before.

It's a long way down.

Two hours later, we were still climbing and descending, climbing and descending.  And for the first time, Pauline started to feel the effects of 4.400 m.  And then it started to rain.  And there we were, the simultaneous high point and low point of our trip.


- You see ?!, Erik says when we get to a 50 m long flat section, I've been here before.


The sun was going down quickly now, and everyone but Erik was getting worried that we wouldn't find the cabana before dark.  Seven hours in, and we could see the cabana from the cliffs.  But Erik said we couldn't go down from here, it's too dangerous.


- We just have to pass this little mountain here, then we can go down, Erik says.  There's a trail leading straight to the cabana, I've hiked it before.

Snowing !

One hour and three little mountains later, with Pauline moving very sluggishly, we reached the rim of the valley where we could descend.  There was no trail.  Just a steep wall of loose rocks and pebbles.  We had no choice now; we started going down.  At this point, Erik, Elske, and her dad were moving ahead, looking for "the trail".  But Elske was stopping every 10 minutes, yelling "Pauline!", trying to maintain a line of sight between us.  Despite her efforts, often we lost sight of the Dutch completely.  It had been raining for nearly two hours.  All the rocks were slippery, and Pauline had the agility of zombie from Night of the Living Dead.  I was sure that at any moment that she was going to fall and twist or break something.  She kept repeating, J'en peut plus, "I can't go on."  And then it got colder and snow replaced the rain.


Well this was the turning point.  High up on the cliff, freezing cold, soaking wet, with altitude sickness and no Dutch hikers and no Colombian cabana in sight, right in the middle of this miserable tragedy, Pauline says, "I can taste my own snot", with a little smile.  I knew then that she would make it down the mountain.  Her brain was on auto-pilot, her legs moving and navigating the rocks without any feedback from her upper nervous system.  We just kept walking, the same pace for the last four hours.


Pretty soon, after ten hours of hiking, we see the cabana, and 200 m before the cabana, we see the trail.


- You see, Erik says, I've hiked this before !

Turn Around...

A Colombian once told me that he liked all kinds of music...Colombian music such as Cumbia and Vallenato,  reggaeton, and Bob Sinclar, you know, all.  But he neglected to mention another important genre...the genre of sappy love songs.  Maybe he didn't mention it because it's understood that all Latinos love songs about love...especially when the love ends in a broken heart.


Now I've been to Mexico (briefly), to Guatemala and Honduras and Nicaragua, and now at the moment, to Colombia.  Other the Spanish language and a fondness for ground corn, there are cultural threads that bind these ex-colonies.  There's a beat that all Latin Americans feet are tapping.  It's not the salsa or the merengue.  Nor the samba, rumba, and tango.  It's more than music, it's a musical soap opera.

And there's just one song to rule them all, one song to find them,
one song to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.


And there ain't nothing darker than a Total Eclipse of the Heart.  That's right baby, you can't go nowhere in this continent and a half without that power-ballad vibrating your eardrums and your soul.

The Rains and Roads of Colombia

La Niña is back.  She's been blamed for the flooding in Australia and the blizzard in the US as well as the mega-tornadoes of late.  Well, in Colombia, she's turned the wet season into a wet year...and it's not over yet !


A lot of the rain soaks into the earth so that up to 30 % of its weight is water weight.  Then it comes crashing down at 80 km/h.  If it's above the road, you get a mountain of dirt, clay, and rocks on the road.  If you're lucky, only half the road is covered.  If it's below the road, you lose some of the road.  If you're lucky, at least half of the road remains.


In fact, as you drive, you see evidence of a landslide every 20 seconds up in the hills.  They're everywhere.  On the roads, you can't go farther than 5 km without encountering one.  And it's like that all over the mountainous part of the country.

I feel much safer with the yellow tape.

On our first excursion away from the city, we took the night bus to El Cocuy, a little village below a national park of the same name.  It's more than 400 km away from Tunja, where we started.  In the States or in Europe, that translates into 4 hours on a major highway or 5 hours on smaller roads.  On this, our first Colombian bus trip, we spent over 11 hours cooped up in a bus that seemed to lean the wrong way every time we approached one of the world's biggest potholes.


By now we've gotten used to the delays, the traffic jams, and potholes large enough to swallow a bus.  And when we ask how long it takes to drive from Tunja to San Gil, the Colombians tell us 2 and half, 3 hours.  Ahh, but that's pre-Niña time, bub.  'Cause in post-Niña land, that trips takes 5 and a half hours !

Punaise de lit

Three weeks into the our trip and this is my first post...


When teaching school children in France, I often heard the kids exclaim punaise in frustration or anger.  They say this so that they can avoid saying putain.  Putain, in French, means 'whore', but they use it like we would use 'shit' or 'fuck'.  And of course English-speaking children can be heard to say 'fudge' or 'shoot' or 'geez louise'... just to avoid the fingerwagging surely to come from mom or the teacher.


Awww, we have to take a test, punaise !  Punaise, you always call on Jean-Francois ! Etc. 


In two years of teaching English to little Frenchies, I never once asked, nay, even wondered what this cute little word meant.


I had to travel halfway across the world, to Colombia, to discover its meaning.  It all started in a small town called San Gil.  A town low in the mountains with a warm and wet climate.  A place any insect might feel at home. 


For two years now, I've known that insects prefer Pauline's blood over my own.  She uses an insect repellent.  I have her.  I probably haven't been piqué by stinging insects more than 4 or 5 times when we travel together.


So on day 2 in San Gil, I wasn't really concerned when Pauline woke up with 5 or 6 bumps on her legs and feet.  Nor on day 3 when she had a baker's dozen.  I started taking this problem seriously, for the first time, when I woke up with a few of my own...and punaise, those little bumps itched like crazy.  Each day afterwards, they multiplied.  And so did the itching.  I tried to be strong.  Tried to resist.  But there were too many !  Punaise !  I scratched and I scratched...and it felt good.

We changed cities, we changed beds, we changed climates, we rubbed our legs in alcohol and anti-itching cream (well, only Pauline tried these last two methods).  Nothing worked.  I have about twenty bites on my legs. Pauline has more than a hundred.


We asked people about mosquitoes, about fleas.  We looked up hitherto unheard of Colombian insects.  Nothing.  Finally, on a hunch, I investigated bed bugs.  The bumps matched, the itching matched, the nighttime feedings matched, and the bed matched.  That's a bingo !  We learned that they can live up to a year without feeding, that they'll live in my clothing and sleeping bag, that they can survive desert temperatures, freezing temperatures, and everything in between. 


So it looks like Pauline and I are going to finish our one-year trip with a few friends.  Good thing they pack light, have a simple diet, and are delighted to go where we go.  Ahhh, "bedbug", it's almost night time...