Tag Archives: views

Rainbow Mountain, a.k.a. Winicunca

September 9, 2018 – September 11, 2018

In the streets of Cusco we had seen advertisements for tours to Rainbow Mountain, or, Winicunca to use the local name,  but I couldn’t find anything in our slightly out-of-date guide book about the hike.  As it turns out, the multi-hued mountain was covered under a layer of ice until recently.  With the changing climate, the ice has now disappeared, revealing striped, rainbow like slopes, and the locals soon figured out that tourists would pay to hike to such a magical place. Interestingly, most of the tourists were Peruvian, possibly captivated by the natural representation of the age old Incan rainbow flag.

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Our First Roadside Breakdown, a Lovely Refugio and a Church Across a Gorge.

July 8, 2018 – July 12, 2018

We were heading up a hill, when suddenly Derek took his foot off of the gas and the truck responded, instantly slowing to a crawl.  I looked at Derek, I looked to the road immediately ahead, and then back at Derek.  There was no animal, no debris, no tope in the road.  “What’s up?”, I asked.  “I have no steering”, Derek said.

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Hot Springs and World Cup Soccer

June 25, 2018 – June 28, 2018

The drive to Salento (about 267 km) was going to take us 6.75 hours, according to Google Maps. We started the long drive, single lane most of the way, and were sharing the road with many trucks. On top of that, there was a lot of road construction to repair damage done by land slides (it has been a very wet year for most of Colombia). We could see that we were not going to make Salento before dark (we do everything we can to avoid driving at night on this trip, one of our few self imposed rules). iOverlander showed a free spot in a rest area above the town of Perreira and it turned out to be great; clean washrooms, fairly quiet after it got dark and an amazing view.

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Barichara, Guane, and Guaimaro Camp

June 8, 2018 – June 12, 2018

We needed to fill our propane tank, and we had seen on iOverlander (we seriously use this app daily) that there were two places in the town of San Gil that other travellers had had good luck with getting their North American style tanks filled. San Gil was on our way….perfect. We tried both places, and they both refused to fill our tanks….we were not 100 percent sure why, but Derek thought that maybe they had said that the pressure levels and the fittings were different, making it impossible. We still had a bit of gas, so we decided to head on to camp and see if we had enough fuel to make coffee and dinner for the next few days.

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Canon Chicamocha

June 6, 2018 – June 8, 2018

The main highway from the city of Bucaramanga to the capital city of Bogota is a two lane highway that winds itself through the foothills and mountains of the Cordillera Occidental, part of the Andean Mountains. Because of the large rigs, the steep curving roads and the complete lack of passing lanes, short distances take a surprisingly long time to drive. Our route for the day was only 77 kilometres but took us approximately 2.5 hours to drive.

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Finca Carajo, Bucaramanga

June 4, 2018 – June 6, 2018

We left Mompox and headed towards the city of Bucaramanga. We had plans to camp at Finca Carajo, a small farm in a cloud forest that had a few hiking trails, and we were excited to get to some cooler temperatures. We made it to the beautiful city of Bucaramanga, where I saw that there were two routes up into the mountains surrounding the city. The recommended one would get us out of the city faster, but then showed miles and miles of curving, switched back roads. The second route would keep us in the city longer, but the mountain road looked much straighter. We chose the second route.

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