The rest of Colombia

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Hello again everyone.

I hope you have had a lovely half term and are recharged ready for the Christmas build up.

When I left you last time we were in Salento and had visited ´Plantations´ coffee farm. From here we travelled on a night bus to Pitilito and then got a ´collectivo´(a jeep taxi) to San Augustin.

San Agustin was incredible as it is surrounded by so much history. We decided we would spend a day trekking by horse to see the remote stone carvings and then a day in the archelogical park. Both of these experiences were really informative. All around the area are big stone carvings, carved from baslic volcanic rock. The biggest carving is 7m tall and they can be as small as 20cm! The interesting thing about these carvings is that there is no writing from the society that made them and the society died out many years ago. They beleive that the carvings were either messages to the gods or used to decorate scared tombs of important people. They have managed to work out the age of some of the stones and the oldest is over 5,000 years old! The stones are carved into human shapes, animals shapes or a mixture of both. They all tell a message, for example the bird (eagle) and snake in its mouth is meant to show good overcoming evil as they saw eagles as good and snakes as bad. Many of the stones were moved or damaged by tomb raiders so they decided to move most from their original position and build the archeological park to keep the rest safe. It was very interesting to look at.

From San Agustin we travelled to Mocoa. It is a small town on the edge of the Amazon Rainforest. We had a walk into the rainforest to a waterfall and lagoon and, again, saw many beautiful butterflies along the way, but we couldn´t do a Amazon expedition deep into the jungle to see lots of wildlife so we are going to do that in a different country.

From Mocoa we went on a very high and bumpy road across to Pasto which was our last stop in Colombia. We had a wander around this city and an early night as the next day was a lot of travelling!!

We have loved our time in Colombia. The scenery has been beautiful and diverse, the people have been SOOOO friendly and have gone out of their way to help us, it has been very safe and we have seen so much incredible wildlife. These sights will stay with us for many years to come.

I´ll write again about Ecudaor.

Love from Miss Thomas

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