Our planet is beautiful in ways you and I can't imagine...

From San Gil, we took a bus to Tunja, which doesn't have too much going for it besides being a bit of a regional transport hub and being one of the nearest cities to El Cocuy. We stayed there 2 nights to pick up some last minute cold-weather gear (of which good quality was hard to find), and a bit of extra food. We also saw a Colombian movie (Uno al año no hace daño, or One a Year Doesn't Do Damage), about a documentary-maker making a doco about drinking in Colombia, who follows a family and their neighbours in their drinking-related exploits. Was pretty good, but understanding everything was a problem...

Then it was a 10 hour bus ride to a wee town called Güicán, along a gravel road in a nice wee valley:

 

We got to Güicán in the evening and found a hotel, who also hooked us up with a guide who would rent us a tent, gas stove, and sleeping bags for the others. The plan for the morning was to breakfast, buy 1 or 2 last things, go to the office to register our intention to go to the park and pay the entrance fee, and be on our way by 12pm. In the end we got to the office at 11:46, one minute after the start of the lunch break. "What a shame for you guys." So we did fuckall for an hour while we waited:

El Cocuy, from outside the National Park office.

Bottle caps from "Poker" beer. They're everywhere.

The guy in the NP office told us we could take a more off-road route than the one planned for the first day, with his instructions being something like "follow that road, and before it reaches the bridge and crosses the river, take a path to the left. There's another bridge further up." Naturally we took the wrong path from the road and got lost for about an hour in a farm, after the trip's first "selfie-time" (the trip was mostly Spanish-language, but "selfie-time" was always as shown):

Finally we returned to the road and asked for directions, from some fortuitously-present locals. After we got going it turned out to be a pretty nice walk:

Having a wee rest before finally crossing the river.

Güicán in the distance.

In the end after being delayed at the office and the farm, we ended up camping in a random field (we weren't yet in the park, where you can only camp in designated spaces, and someone assured us the farmer wouldn't have any beef):

Selfie-time before bed. The only that wasn't washed out and doesn't have closed eyes. How hard can it be?

The next day we had to make up the distance from the first, as well as walk the planned second day. So we got up fucking early.

Destination: somewhere up on the right.

Lotta omelettes.

Upside-down pine tree?!

Approaching where we were supposed to stop the night before, up that valley was the next leg.

Refugio we'd planned to camp next to, but which served as a nice coffee stop. Also one of the sleeping bags we hired was actually a sleeping bag-bag full of clothes, so we got an actual sleeping bag sent up in the morning with the milk truck. The owner also showed us around a bit and told us about the house. He was pretty excited to inform me that he has sheep from NZ, and showed me a photo. I assumed we'd see some on the walk so didn't photo the photo, but we didn't in the end...

A group of Japanese people that stayed in the park in the 70s or 80s. I believe he said they stayed for 20 days, and then sent this photo with another from Tokyo.

Started the day somewhere on the dark splotch on the far left, I believe.

Cows are curious. This one was nosing my pack when I left it on the ground.

View from above the valley, which comes up from the right.

Inside of house made of frailejón (more on them later).

First frailejones we saw. These guys only live at high altitudes in a type of ecosystem called páramo, and act a little like cactuses, storing water for large periods of time. They grow at the jaw-dropping rate of 1cm/year.

Bebe frailejón.

View from the lunch spot.

Post-lunchtime selfie-time.

Destination: white house top-centre.

Lake just around the corner from the camp site.

After walking for so long we didn't feel like cooking, so we bought a much more substantial dinner from the lodge we were camped next to. When the sun'd gone down, the world froze, and all the clothes we'd brought came out. The clouds were kind enough to grace us with their absence:

Test with bumped tripod.

Fuck the universe is cool.

We didn't end up getting up that early the following morning, having changed the plan from "carry all our stuff all day to camp next to a lake where it'll be colder than here" to "carry some food and clothes and walk up to see the lake then return to camp." The altitude and cold hadn't been kind to our attempts to sleep... So after the sun was well up, we set out.

The campsite was in the shadow of the exact peak when the sun rose.

The valley we walked up the previous day. Lodge to the left, valley to the first lodge to the right somewhere.

Lodge/campsite somewhere almost dead-centre.

Target: that steep mofo on the right.

Once we got to the top of the pass, we found ourselves on this seemingly-neverending broken up rock slab.

The initial plan was to talk up along the snowline somewhere on the left, and around to a big lake. Failing that, we wanted to walk up, see the lake from above, and return. In the end we walked up as far as we could be bothered on the rock slab, lunched, and returned.

Selfie-time with ear-warming scarf turban.

"Guys, come, the photo of the century is here."

The rock in the middle is called the "Devil's Pulpit," we were originally going to skirt around the bottom of it somewhere.

The highest we got to. We were camping at about 3900m, and were told that at the campsite it could get to -5°C or so.

Another lunchtime selfie-time.

After returning to camp, we once again didn't have energy to cook (the other 2 had pounding headaches, I assume from the altitude and exercise - mine was a dull throb), and did sweet fuck-all before going to bed.

In the morning we got up even later than the day before, and Marjorie was completely knocked out for the day, so Nico and I went for a walk along a string of lagoons to find a nice place to sit for a while:

This guy's pretty old...

Sprouting frailejón.

After our walk, we cooked one of the dinners for lunch, packed all our stuff up, and walked an hour and a bit to the place we were getting picked up for one last selfie-time:

Three peoples' lives.

The following morning, we walked around the town a bit, marveling out how time seems to stand still in tiny places like this on weekends. Small town folk know how to live. We then walked to some natural hot swimming pools to relax a little.

That evening, I took a bus back to Tunja, leaving the others to do the same the following morning. Hotel was cheaper in Tunja ^^

Thanks to Marjorie and Nico for their company (and photos!), we may've only seen almost nothing of the park, but it was fucking amazing nonetheless!

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.