Perhaps a stop in southern Colombia? (5)

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Ecuador warranted more time to explore, but I had a sufficiently negative view of Quito that I just wanted to get away from the capital, and with a glance at the calendar revealing I had only 7 weeks left in South America, it was time to be moving on anyway.

On the bus north to Tulcan, my neighbour was an Ecuadorian woman who'd been living in New Jersey for the last 3 decades. She was back to visit her parents who lived just over the border in Colombia, which meant I had the benefits of her (hopefully incorrect) opinions of Colombia and Colombians, as well as being with a local to avoid the gringo taxi fare from Tulcan to the frontier. The crossing itself was almost deserted, and I took some mild flak from the Colombian official, who had difficulty finding space in my passport for his stamp. Unusually, I didn't even have to fill in a form. While I waited, my eye was caught by a poster showing photos of FARC members and the corresponding bounty on their heads, with some of the headshots ominously crossed out.

Having bumped into an English guy also heading north, we took a colectivo to Ipiales then jumped on an extremely uncomfortable bus to Pasto. The scenery initially looked impressively green and mountainous, but then a steady downpour set in, the windows steamed up, and it became apparent that my travelling companion had been at the same hostel as me in Quito and was responsible for at least some of the late-night pounding on the front door necessitated by the nightwatchman neglecting his duties.

The rain had become a deluge by the time we reached Pasto, forcing us to take a cab to the only hostel we had info about. It was clear that the town's drainage system had been built by the same incompetents who've won most such contracts throughout South America, with it being impossible to walk the streets without being splashed by traffic. For the money, my room was enormous and offered a vast selection of cable channels, though the combined toilet/shower cubicle was straight out of Southeast Asia and the electric showerhead smacked of Bolivia. When we popped out later for dinner, we passed a clothes shop where all the mannequins were indicative of a country fond of plastic surgery.

The following day dawned bright and we decided to visit Laguna de la Cocha, a supposedly beautiful lake nearby. With Pasto (and most other Colombian towns) having a helpful grid layout with numbered calles in one direction and numbered carreras running perpendicular to them, one might think that finding addresses should be no problem, however that only works if you have the right one to begin with. We started with 3 possibilities for where to catch a bus to the lake - one from the godawful Lonely Planet, one from the hostel manager, and one from an information card pinned to the hostel noticeboard. None seemed to be correct. We asked a couple of locals - no luck. A travel agent sent us to the bus station, whereupon we were told to go back into town to one of the previous incorrect addresses. Eventually we asked a cab driver to take us to the bus stop, which he duly did and it was in an unrecognisable place. Bear in mind that the lake is the most well-known of a handful of tourist attractions in the area.

The journey to the lake was enlivened by a local guy who insisted that we were Germans, which he later changed to brothers, though he treated my request for him to speak more slowly with one of the three standard responses I've had from people in South America - he ignored it and kept rabbiting on at the same unintelligible speed (the other two are to start speaking in English or break off the conversation altogether, the implication being that talking in Spanish is only worth doing if it's done fluently).

Sadly the weather at this point had clouded over, so our arrival at the lake was an anti-climax. The village nearby was a string of restaurants, and boatmen prowled around looking for potential custom which, on this day, was only us. There didn't appear to be any sort of walking trail and we soon realised that, lunch aside, a boat trip was our only possible entertainment. That too had little appeal with the grey skies so after sampling some trout we returned to Pasto, the onset of another rainstorm providing subsequent vindication of that decision.

I had a quick look around the town when the weather had cleared up, seeing just two other gringos and noting an enormous number of Renaults, but that was to be it for my Pasto sightseeing.

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