Guatapé – Day 2 : interlude

Turns out we didn’t go to a farm today.

In the end, it was more convenient for them if we arrived tomorrow in the middle of the day than tonight, so we had a nice break in this pretty town. We bought some items for when we are there, like a big water canteen and marmalade, because the closest town will be an hour walk from there, and they won’t provide us with everything. After all, this is not summer camp.

We took advantage of this to visit more Guatapé (understand : walk a bit between our hostel and the different places where we ate). This town is known for its colorfully painted house, and especially their cement bas-relief, also painted. More often than not, there is a theme in relation to the house : a worker with his tools on a workshop or music instruments on a house where piano lessons can be heard… Sometimes it is beautiful, sometimes corny, and some other times, disturbingly detailed…

We also used the time to get rid of a lot of stuff to do : housing tax, and above all accounting. We went back till august, cause it was a mess, and for the trip, we have this huge Excel file of the death to control our expenses by categories, date, country… It also allows us to check if we don’t just lose money, because colombian pesos are counted by the thousand (on the shops, the stores have a price in dollars, which are actually one thousand of pesos and don’t add up to a dollar at all). This means that lately, we are millionaires (but not at a given time, since ATM are limited to 600 000 pesos anyway) and so we can afford candlelit pizza night !

In the “funny things” category, we witness several nice examples of vehicles today : we already mentioned the mototaxis, sort of 3-wheeled tuk-tuk who have a roof and a bad time going uphill. During our dinner, we saw several of them with colored neon of blinking lights, and since they were delivering pizzas for their friends, we understood why Deliveroo was doomed to fail in rural Colombia. Finally, the local police was probably going to a party (we don’t have a picture, sorry), the two of them on a single scooter, leaning backwards, speeding downhill. With the kaki uniform and the neon green armbands, they were hardly plausible and looked more like a costume-party gone bad…

Tomorrow, we have a bus in the morning for Tierra Dulce, a small farm near Alejandria, where we will stay for a few days. We think we will have the internet there, but just in case, no one panics, we will spend half our time in coffee fields, and the other in hammocks ! XO