River Rambles in Colombia
One thing I have loved about living close to Cancún? The whole world flies to Cancún which means, Cancún flies to the whole world! (Sí, estoy disponible para tu próxima campaña de publicidad, Secretaria de Turismo de Quintana Roo.)
One such place is Colombia and while the flights to Bogotá and Medellin were comparable, we chose to fly to Medellin and take buses from there.
I asked my friend Kate from Wild World Women, who spent a month visiting Colombia with her wife Sarah, for recommendations in the area around Medellin. And I actually completely intended to follow her guidance until the story below happened. She recommended the Guatape area which did indeed look and sound beautiful. Next visit!
My agenda was purely this: I wanted to spend more time outside the city than inside the city and I wanted to drink coffee where they grow coffee.
Coffee plant after a downpour
After two days in Medellin of riding on cable cars and watching the hustle and bustle, we headed to the bus station to get ourselves to a smaller town.
On the hilly walk to take the metro to the bus terminal, my fiancé accidentally bumped a Colombiana as he managed his backpack and my suitcase. His apology turned into a conversation about where we could meet our criteria for a sleepy town in the coffee region where we could relax for a few days. She was a professor at one of the local universities and very generously recommended three towns between 2 and 4 hours away by bus.
Like anyone who does traveling like it is an adventure video game, we accepted this quest and caught a bus to Jardín, Antioquia.
And it was incredible. All the towns were so lovely. You could have coffee in the square by day and then by night sip aguardiente and watch the big shots in town riding their fancy prancing horses. The best big shots of all were these incredibly hot women in Jardín, the adult daughters of the horse owners, who would stop briefly at the front of the bar without dismounting their horses while the bartender brought them a shot. Ultimate baddies.
But the highlight was finding that my fiancé and I have the exact same idea of a perfect afternoon: playing around in a river (preferably with a town dog that has decided to adopt you for the day).
We had actually originally set off to find the Taparto waterfall, but I am glad we decided that was going to be too hard and instead enjoyed an easy day of getting rained on and then sun-dried in the Andes Mountains.
I have more pictures and stories from being in Colombia almost two weeks in May. I am going to try to organize and share here. You know how if you don’t do it soon after it almost never happens? Yeah, me too.
But the river rambling was the highlight and I loved the pictures we took that day so just putting this here.
