With our somewhat scary encounter with the armed, uniformless men behind us, our next stop was to be the Tatacoa Desert, an arid but beautiful landscape in Southern Colombia. We decided to take the more direct route in which turned out to be an interesting drive along an old railroad bed that included train tunnels and bridges!
Even though everyone says Colombia is completely safe now (the ministry of tourism has adopted the tagline, “The only risk is wanting to stay”), there are still a few hot spots in the country where the FARC continue to intimidate the local people. Tourists, we had heard, are never targeted, but we wanted to make sure, since the area we wanted to visit next was in the middle of the area where the FARC are still active.
We asked at a couple of police checkpoints, and in both cases were told, “It’s a little complicated.” Sounded to us like, “It’s dangerous, but we don’t want to tell the tourists that.” We were heading to an archeological site known as Tierradentro, where there are 1000 year old underground tombs to explore. The police told us that it was definitely safe as far as La Plata, and that we should enquire further there.
We stopped at a military post near La Plata, and the soldiers there told us that there was no problem. So we pressed ahead and enjoyed a day off from driving in a tiny town in the mountains exploring the tombs.
After another long day during which we covered less than 100 miles, we re-emerged onto the Pan-Americana (the Pan-Am highway) at Popoyan, from where headed south to the Ecuador border. The roads remained slow and winding, but the scenery was beautiful. We spent the night at the famous Santuario de Las Lajas, a spectacular cathedral built over a river canyon in commemoration of a sighting of the Virgin Mary in the rocks there.
We crossed into Ecuador the next day and were greeted by two wonderful things: Diesel costs $1.03 per gallon and the roads are beautiful! Heaven!
Witt, Whats not to like about $1 gas and nice roads? We printed a picture of Quinn and Llama. Now our condo looks like home. HT
Beautiful! Loved the puncture of Quinn.