San Gil, where there's adventure tourism to be had

After so much time in cities, I decided to get out of the concrete jungle and do some stuff, so I went to San Gil, adventure-tourism place of Colombia. Naturally I was told the bus was longer than it was, and I left earlier than I should've, arriving at 3am and not being allowed into the hostel to chill as my reservation was for the following night. So I had a few hours, which I killed sitting in the main plaza listening to a Colombia tell me his life's stories much too quickly to understand.

Naturally that day I was petty tired and did nothing.

The next day I went on a canyoning tour, which was pretty sweet. First we spent some unmeasured-amount of time walking and crawling and bum-shuffling through a cave:

Tiny bats @18mm

Wee sticks holding the place up.

Then when spent much of the rest of the day rapelling, walking and jumping off things to get a bit more down the river. Couldn't get the camera wet, so here's just a couple of the rappelling:

Not upside-down enough :(

The next day we went to a waterfall just outside the town, which illustrated something interesting here: literally everything costs money, even just going in to National Parks (which doesn't stop the roads in the NPs from being total pieces of shit, which is probably still a good thing). So we went to the main entrance of this place and paid our $7,000, then walked up a track through farmland, essentially, to get to the main waterfall:

Then we noticed a smaller waterfall that didn't look like it was full of Colombians, so went over there for a nice cold shower...

Johanna had heard that you could walk back down the river instead of through the farm, so we did that. At this point, a guy came and told us that the part of river a couple of falls below this ladder isn't part of what we paid for, but assured us we wouldn't have to pay anyway.

Beyond this point the guy wouldn't let the other Colombians up, because they'd only paid to access the neighbours' land, not his. We were still assured we wouldn't have to pay more, but I suspect that because it wasn't his money he didn't care. Near the house/entrance there was a Colombian woman on the phone saying "there's 3 foreigners coming... yeah, they're coming right now," as we walked past her. Not sure if she was talking about whether we had to pay or not, but noone said anything to us directly.

Then, a wee walk to see the sunset and some of the town's lights:

In San Gil there's only one company that does mountain biking tours, and their tour is downhill all day. Knowing that I wouldn't have to ride uphill, I thought I'd check it out. There's a bunch more photos somewhere of the actual biking, but I can't find'em. We started here, and first went down to Barichara, the white-ish splodge right-of-centre:

Then, we rode through the town to the other side to go down into the valley of the Río Suarez:

At the bottom, we stopped for a swim, then rode on the top of the truck to  the top of the hill in the middle of the photo above for lunch with a view.

Half-pink tree!

Barichara somewhere in the middle.

Then, we  rode most of the way back down to the river, and only one wanted to do the 14km cross-country bit (not even the guide looked keen), so we rode on the truck for that bit again, but I forgot my camera.

Two days later, I did a rafting tour, which apparently includes up to Class 5 rapids when the river's higher (no experience necessary (!)). But apparently it hadn't rained for almost a month, so the river was pretty low...

We did have to practice self-rescue though.

And we got stuck on rocks more than once.

I'd been talking for a couple of days with a Swiss girl, Marjorie, who was waiting for a friend-of-a-friend to arrive to go to the El Cocuy National Park, which looked amazing, so we left San Gil to finish planning and buying stuff for that the next day.