Bogota Blogger

About a 1.5 hour hike straight up the mountain from Cabo San Juan is an old Indian town known as Pueblito.  There’s a more famous and probably more interesting town called Ciudad Perdida (Lost City) nearby also, but it’s a six-day expedition (three day hike up, two day hike down), so we weren’t able to take that in on this trip.

The hike up has some challenging spots, over rocks, through cave-like spaces created by huge  boulders, a few streams to cross. But still, lots of people do it wearing flip-flops, and you see the occasional barefoot hiker.  At a few points there are great views of Cabo San Juan, but the trail is mostly jungle-like, so these views are just occasional.

What’s in the Pueblito?

Once there, there are terraced stone circles, in the middle of which apparently houses and other buildings had once stood. There is an indiginous family living in Pueblito, in a house that is modeled on houses that were built during the time that Pueblito was in its heyday.  But now they’ve  also got white plastic Walmart-style lawn furniture. The Indian family sells coke and chips and the same Colombian-flag-colored string bracelets you can find on any street corner in Bogota or any other town. But they do live a simple life (though they do have electricity, solar-generated). They dress in white tunics. 

There were some animals roaming around the Pueblito. So, I added them up in my head, all the creatures we had seen on the expedition that day, and came up with the following:  ants, butterflies, a monkey, chickens, birds, a snake, turkeys, dogs, cats, horses, burros, and a pig.

A Real Macaca

On the trail up, we kept passing and being passed by a French couple. At one point when they were ahead of us they stopped to watch a monkey climbing around (it was probably a Titi monkey), and when we got there, I called the monkey macaca. I explained to them about George Allen using the term on the campaign trail last year to refer to a guy from of Indian heritage working for his opponenbt, and losing his US Senate seat because of it, resulting in the Republicans losing the Senate because of it. So, they  started calling the monkey macaca too, and I heard them tell some other people it was a macaca.  I doubt it is, but if it turns out that that particular species of Colombian monkey is known as macaca in the future, it will be thanks to George Allen.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 17th, 2007 at 7:20 am and is filed under Out of Town Trips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.