Where's Andrew

GUATEPE, COLUMBIA - JUL 31 to AUG 22 

The Lakefront of Guatape

On Wednesday August 1st, I start my first one-on-one Spanish lessons with Yony here in Guatape. I've spent the last few weeks travelling with English speaking travellers and have had only a few occasions to use Spanish and I find what little language skills I've acquired get rusty real fast. So, my first 2 hour lesson is pretty bad. It's like I have forgotten almost everything I have learned and I know Yony I bit surprised considering I have been travelling for over 4 months and took lessons in Vancouver. He asks me what I want to work on and I decide that improving my travel Spanish is my first priority and working on present tense verbs and vocabulary related to meeting people and having a conversation would be the second priority. My second lessons the next day goes much better. I'm feeling more comfortable and more of what I've already learned seems to be coming back. The lessons are for 2 more hours and another 2 on Friday but I decide to bump up the lessons to 3 hours next week. Yony also gives me homework each day which is great because I really want to improve by the time the 2 weeks is up. Yony can be quite imaginative in his assignments. He asks me to write an e-mail to a Spanish speaking friend describing Guatape so I sent a message to Irlanda who is a good friend of mine back in Vancouver and is married to one of my best friends Adrian.

Having Fun in the Lake

I'm sure my message was full of all kinds of mistakes but it was actually quite fun to write. It is so nice to stay in a place for a while. Lake View Hostel is a great place to stay and the owners and staff are so friendly and welcoming. I'm staying in a nice private room with a private bath. The owners are Greg from California and Nick from London. Nick lives and dies depending on whether England and Manchester United are winning or not and Greg is a real down to earth, no nonsense guy from California. They have 2 nice hostel dogs named Sophia and Amber and some great staff that work here. The staff are actually volunteers who get free accommodations and use of the kayaks, bikes and fishing equipment.

Nick, Reuben & Greg on the Deck at Lake View Hostal

Jenna has been here for over 3 months and is from Minnesota. Lu is from Taipei and she is one of the nicest people I've met on my trip and she arrived at the hostel about a week before me. And Reuben is from Australia and is also one of the nicest guys that I have met. After being here for about a week, I almost feel like one of the volunteers and everyone has made me feel extremely welcome.

View from the Mountains Above Guatape

Pretty much everyday I try and get some good exercise in. There are a few good hikes around Guatape that I have done, one is to a series of waterfalls, another loops up to the top of the surrounding mountains and you come down on a trail that the locals use to get livestock up to the upper pastures, another loops into a valley where a monastery is located before joining the main highway at La Piedra (boulder) de Penol and the last loops into another valley on the other side of the boulder. The lake is also full of small mouth bass and I've caught a few of them spin casting from shore. Most of the hikes are about 3 hours or more and they are usually a lot of hills which are challenging because Guatape is 2000m above sea level.

I have also got into the habit of cooking meals at the hostel. Cooking here is a challenge as the selection of food and ingredients is quite limited.

Twilight at Guatape´s Lakefront

There are no large supermarkets here, only a few small stores, a couple of butcher shops and 3 fruit and vegetable stands in the centre square. Spices and seasoning are next to impossible to find other than salt and garlic. Even the pepper they sell is ground into powder and basically tasteless. There is also very few vegetables to choose from, I can buy carrots, potatoes, tomatoes, red & green peppers, peas, onions and yucca root. The pork and chicken are very good here and cheap but the beef is always quite tough. Trying to make a sauce for anything like a stir fry has been challenging. I've had a few restaurant meals as well but the affordable meal is always the plate of the day which is once again rice, beans, fried plantine and a small portion of meet.

Typical Street in Guatape

The town of Guatape is wonderful. It is clean with no garbage on the streets, all the houses are fixed up nicely and painted bright colours and they all have some custom painting on either side of the main doorways. There is a beautiful center square and a nice walkway along the malecon (lake shore). On weekend, there are all sorts of vendors with booths setup along the malecon and there is a zip line that goes above the lake to a point of land about half a kilometer away. You can also go on party boats that cruise the lake or rent jet skis, peddle boats and kayaks.

Party Boats

A popular place to go by boat is to Pablo Escobar's finca (farm). It is really a huge house right on the lake with a couple of outbuildings including a large discotech that he used to entertain business associates and he would fly in prostitutes from Medellin. There is a helipad next to the house. A large battle occurred here a bit before his death and the house was basically destroyed in the resulting fire, only the cement shell of the house is left.

Jenna & I with the Light of Guatape

My sister Kelly had couriered a replacement credit card to me on August 2nd through UPS on a 2 day delivery. I figured it would take longer but I expected it to be here well within the 2 weeks that I planned to stay. After about 10 days we get a call from a Colombian courier who is the local agent for UPS wanting to confirm the address even though the address that they have is correct. They talk to Greg from the hostel and tell him that they will deliver it by Wednesday August 15th but of course it does not come. I was planning on leaving on Thursday but I want to get this card so I stay. We follow up with them again on Friday morning and Greg is now told that it left Bogota on Thursday and will be here by Tuesday (the Monday is a holiday). They are now lying to us saying the delay was caused by an incorrect address but I have verified with UPS Canada that the original shipping address is in fact correct.

Shane & Seleka

So now this 2 day delivery will take almost take 3 weeks. On the Tuesday, we follow up with the UPS agent in Bogota again and now they tell us that they sent the package to another courier company last Thursday and it should take another 5 or 6 days but it is now out of their control and there is nothing they can do to. At this point, I have no faith that the delivery will ever actually happen. So, I cancel the card and ask MasterCard to send my sister another card and I will have Kelly send this new card to me via Federal Express. I've been told that FedEx has offices in all the capitol cities of South America and that Kelly can ship my card to one of these offices and then I can pick it up there. So maybe I will be able to get this card shipped to Quito in Ecuador or possibly Lima Peru. Who new this would be so difficult? I hope Kelly is able to get a refund on the $100 courier cost from UPS.

View from the Building on El Penol

I continue my Spanish classes during the week for 11 days for a total of 30 hours. We covered a lot of stuff including the ING form of verbs. I'm getting very comfortable with the structure of Spanish and can write in Spanish quite well. My pronunciation is also improving but I am really struggling in memorizing the vocabulary especially verbs. My memory is usually good so I'm not sure why I am having so much trouble. I also struggle with hearing and understanding what the local people are saying. They speak very fast and I often struggle even with things I know like numbers and very simple phrases. Yony says it is normal, but I have never struggled so much in learning anything before like I am with Spanish and it is frustrating. I feel I learned a lot but not as much as I had expected. Well I guess we are often our own worst critics. I've put together some detailed spreadsheets with vocabulary and verbs and I am working at memorizing it and hopefully I can start to really apply what Yony has taught me.

Shane & Seleka Hiking to the Falls

I really enjoyed my lessons with Yony. He is a good teacher and a really nice guy. I've been trying to help him with some web based meeting applications because he wants to be able to teach Spanish remotely. Hopefully what I helped him with helps. Actually a strange thing happened one day while I was with him. We went to his favorite local restaurant for lunch. I paid the bill and left the money on the table. We then went to an Internet store nearby and were getting Yony registered on this new meeting website when the waiter came riding up on his bike. He said only $2,000 Pesos was left to pay our bill of $20,000 but I left $22,000. So, I think someone took the $20,000 (approximately $11US) Peso note and left the $2,000 Peso note but I'm not positive. Anyway, I 'm sure that the waiter was telling the truth and I quickly paid him the missing money after apologizing. The lesson learned is always pay the cash direct to the waiter instead of leaving the money on the table.

1st of 6 Waterfalls

I really met some terrific people at the hostel while I stayed there. Most were there for only a day or 2 but a few stayed longer. I met Shane and Seleka, a 30 something married couple from Australia. They have recently left London after living there for 10 years and now they are travelling for 9 months before returning to Perth. We really seemed to get along and did a fair bit of stuff together. Shane loves to cook and loves to cook for other people which worked out great for me. One of our nicest meals was some fresh Rainbow Trout that we caught ourselves at a fish farm near the hostel. He also made some awesome French Onion soup and some terrific rice pudding. Another nice couple were Eva and Cedric from France. Eva made some terrific crepes to go with the French Onion Soup. It was a great meal that night but the only contribution I made was some nice dark rum and coke which we all over indulged in. Eva and Cedric had some interesting stories to tell about their travels so far especially about hitch hiking through Patagonia and Christmas in Ushuaia. They are slowly travelling north and plan to be in Vancouver at some point, I wonder if I'll be home by then to show them around?

Catching Trout for Dinner with a Bamboo Pole

Shane and Seleka ended up loving Guatape as much as I did and after a week as paying guests, signed on for 2 weeks as volunteers at the hostel when they heard Reuben and Lu were leaving. One evening, the 3 of us took a colectivo (small Jeep transit) to the nearby town of El Penol to have dinner at a very nice Indian restaurant. The owner named Sam had a restaurant in New York for over 20 years and the curry chicken and Naan bread was awesome and a nice change from rice and beans. One day Seleka and I did a new walk that was supposed to be a big loop but we missed a turnoff and ended up having to retrace our steps after going a good 2.5 hours in one direction while Shane was off kayaking with another guest named David from Kansas. By the end of the day, I'm not sure who was more sore Seleka and I after walking for over 5 hours or Shane and David who kayaked for about the same length of time. Shane and Seleka are travelling a similar path to me over then next 5 or 6 months so I'm really hoping to meet up with them again. In fact, I'm sure we will, it's really just a matter of where.

Finca´s Near Guatape

If it wasn't for the dammed dogs, my stay in Guatape would have been perfect. Everyone in Colombia seems to have a dog or maybe 2 or 3. Unlike Central America, these are nice dogs and are often pure breeds. But, the dogs usually have free run of the streets and are out all night long and they bark at everything and nothing. The worst offender was a smallish dog named Nacho. Nacho is owned by a family who live behind the hostel and would usually be outside well past midnight. The father would leave to work around 4:00AM and let Nacho out as he left for work if the dog wasn't already out. Nacho would come down the driveway right near the hostel and bark for hours non-stop. This is typical of many of the local dogs all throughout Colombia but Nacho was the worst. No matter how many times Nick and Greg complained, the family would still let the dog out early each morning. It's almost as if Colombians are immune to the sound of dogs barking because a dog is always barking somewhere. Anyway, one day a couple weeks before I arrived, Nick and Greg dog knapped Nacho and drove him to the nearby town of San Rafael about a 40 minute drive away. Much to their dismay, Nacho found his way back home 10 days later. This may sound like a harsh solution but there were nights and mornings when I was literally plotting Nachos demise while he non-stop barked outside my window. Too bad I'm out of practise when it comes to rock throwing.

The Lake Around Guatape

Another smaller problem was some of the Colombians and how they like to party. Like everywhere else I have travelled so far, Colombians like music, they like to play it loud and they seem to have no concept that they might be disturbing someone else. It was not unusual to have a party going on at one of the nearby houses to late in the morning. There was also a favourite local hangout on a nearby point along the lake where people would like to party. One morning the music started at 4:50AM and the music was rave dance music at a very high volume, the police finally came by an hour later and shut down the party. But usually, it was music played all day and into the late evening or early morning, mostly just on weekends but not always. Locals will even come onto the bus playing music on a small portable system as loud as it will play without any consideration for anyone else. They even have an add campaign on TV showing this behavior that asks people not to play loud music on the bus and other public places.

After 22 days, and without receiving the UPS delivery, I finally leave Guatape. It's been great staying in one place for so long without having to pack up my stuff or spend all day travelling but I'm actually itching to get moving again. My first stop will be in Salento in the coffee region and then on to San Agustin before crossing the boarder into Ecuador within a week. I'm expecting to stay in Ecuador for about a month then on to Peru for about 5 weeks then to Bolivia for another 5 weeks. I'm guessing I will spend Christmas and New Years in Chile and then will head to Patagonia in early January. I am still aiming to be in Brazil for Carnival this February. Hopefully I will hear from some of my Vancouver friends about meeting me somewhere along the way. Ciao for now.