I’d been reading some blog posts about Colombia, and I must say that the best way to get good, up to date info when traveling is to read these travel blogs! One of them happened to mention this village that isn’t too far from San Gil, the caveat being you have to take a 4X4 to get there, but it sounded like a place I’d like. Guadalupe is known for it’s wide shallow stream a bit outside of town that has all these swimming holes carved into the bedrock of the river. The photos looked really cool. It’s called Las Gachas, which translated into English is ‘the porridge’ which makes no sense, but apparently it’s an indigenous word. It’s also the type of place where people from outside of town will ride a horse into town as opposed to a car/moto. Like an old country western.
my stopover in Soccoro,if you have one arm, driving a motorcycle doesn’t seem like the best idea…
From San Gil I took a 30 minute mini bus to a town called Soccoro, and then booked a 4x4 to Guadalupe from there. It’s basically pickup truck with the back converted into seats. The roads were half rock half concrete tracks winding through the hills passing cute little farms and houses on the way. Besides the rough road it was easy to tell this was not on the usual gringo tourist trail just by some of the looks I was getting. After 1.5 hours we finally pulled up to the town square which dropped me off right in front of the only hostel in town. I was the only one staying there!
I dropped off my stuff and started the 45 minute hike to Las Gachas, which is actually a beautiful walk, skirting the edge of some steep hills and giving you great views across a tremendous valley. The countryside in this part of Colombia is very pleasing to the eye.
I ended up being followed by some kids walking in the same direction as me on their way home from school, which allowed me to have some fun practicing my poor spanish, much to their amusement. And they did point me in the right direction to Las Gachas when I got close. Like I said before, it’s basically a shallow river with a bunch of holes in it. Although I did screw up a little bit, this was the one time I hiked not wearing socks with my shoes, and apparently the riverbed is so slippery that you’re supposed to wear socks to get a better grip so you don’t slip and fall! Oops. I managed alright though. It’s definitely a fun place! At certain points you can basically do a slip n slide on the slick bedrock into the little pools. And it wasn’t crowded at all, a handful of locals and two other gringos.
I ended up talking to the two other tourists, both of them were expats in Medellin (one Canadian, one American) and doing a little roadtrip, as one them owned a car - which is a luxury in Colombia because they’re very expensive here! They had actually contracted the guy who owned my hostel to show them around the area as a guide. They were a little older, but fun guys, they definitely liked to drink. The Canadian guy was showing me racy photos of his 30 yr girlfriend in Medellin, before and after the boob job that he paid for, ha. They invited me to go on a little excursion the next morning to some lookout point and little known waterfalls, so sure! Why not? We’d be getting off the beaten track, from off the beaten track. Sounded fun. Here’s some photos of the walk home as the sun was starting to go down, only iphone photos though :(
The next morning I met up with the guys and Jose, the hostel owner/guide, to do our little excursion. We drove about 30 minutes outside of town and parked at a non-descript spot on the side of the road. From there Jose opened a gate and about 20 minutes later we had a great panoramic view over the canyon. Then we meandered through some more farmland and through another gate or two (it’s all private property but Jose says he knows all the owners) and down a steep trail with a large rockwall on our right, with water dripping down over the edge, creating a rainbow effect in some places where the sunlight shone through. Eventually we got down to the bottom where the views open up to this gorgeous waterfall, that hardly anybody every visits! It was pretty special. Although Jose wouldn’t let me swim because he thought the undercurrent was too strong, which I was pretty incredulous, but whatever. In small towns Colombians are very protective of the tourists. In fact, when we were in town we got asked by the police to take a photo with them to demonstrate how well they were looking after the gringos! Colombians in general are very aware of how their country’s dangerous past looks to outsiders and are very eager to shed that reputation.
