San Gil

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With only a few weeks left in Colombia, I really wanted to visit San Gil which is billed as the extreme sports capital of Colombia. About an 8 hour drive outside of Bogotá, four of us went in the car on Friday night and had the Saturday, Sunday and most of Monday there as it was a bank holiday weekend (again!).

San Gil itself was amazing, a really beautiftul colonial town up in the mountains with blue skies and lots of sun. Perfect for chilling out in the late afternoons and evenings after the day's activities, especially as we had a nice outdoor jacuzi in the hostel bar!

The first day we were a little tired from the journey and decided to save the weekend's main activity, white water rafting, for Sunday. The guys in the hostel told us about 'torrentismo' about an hour outside the village so we headed that way. We arrived at a series of huge waterfalls of between 50 and 100m cascading down the mountains and did a short hike to the top of a 70m, where we harnassed up and absailed down the waterfall - amazing fun! The Sunday we went to the Río Suarez where you could white water raft down Grade 5 rapids. The guides told us the water level was a lot lower than usual as they hadn't had much rain, so unfortunately the rapids weren't as big as usual but there was the added excitement of there being far more rocks exposed than usual! Still, they were plenty big enough to cause a few upsets as one of the German students in our raft found out, as he fell out in the middle of the biggest of the rapids and spent a good few minutes being thrown around before finally getting back into the boat more than a little shocked! Luckily the cameraman who was going down in a canoe ahead of us managed to film the whole thing and we were able to watch his ordeal in slow motion a few hours later. Priceless.

Unfortunately some of the photos won't upload, but these are the ones that did...

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