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Published: November 24th 2008
Burial chamber
Alto de SegoviaThe distance from San Agustin to San Andres is somewhere in the region of 100km as the
cuervo flies which, in this part of the world, meant a journey in three parts involving 5.5 hours of travel time. First up was a whiz to Pitalito, requiring a mere hour in a camioneta (essentially a small Chevy pick-up with a covered back and two parallel benches). I sat in the back and was rewarded with a pleasant breeze, mountain views, and no fellow passengers. Pitalito bus station was like the others I've been to in Colombia - full of touts on the prowl for customers, but who will also point you in the direction of the right company if your destination isn't covered by their own.
The next leg, to La Plata, was in another camioneta, this time for 2 hours 40 minutes. The first hour was on a paved road, which then rapidly deteriorated to a rough track that was so dusty that within minutes I was taking out my contact lenses. The bumping around in the back reached a maximal level soon after, just as my one fellow passenger got out and it started to rain. I wrestled with
Moth on my boot
Alto del Aguacate the various panels that could be zipped into place to keep out inclement weather, the effort of which left me feeling vaguely nauseous and I was glad when we arrived in La Plata rather sooner than the ETAs I'd been given in Pitalito.
A brief wait later, and I was on my final camioneta ride of the day, a mere 1 hour 40 minutes of jolting mayhem to crawl to San Andres, the most popular base for visiting the region of Tierradentro. During this ride, we passed a mangled rope bridge high over a river, and a fellow passenger explained that an avalanche caused by a volcanic eruption of Nevado del Huila in 2007 had triggered a massive rise in the water level, which had wrecked the bridge - twelve years after an eruption of the same volcano had killed over 20,000 people in mudslides.
I'm going to have to stop using Laos as my benchmark for slow public transport, as I've had many more slothlike journeys in South America than I ever had in Laos. However in Laos there was no way any piece of public transport would ever be anything but massively overcrowded.
San Andres
Colourful leaves
On the way to Alto del Aguacate is not large and I took a room in a hospedaje near where I'd been dropped off, owned by a friendly old dear and her equally friendly old dog, Negra. Negra was so unfussy about food that she would beg from me when I was eating bread for breakfast. My OJ was made from fruits plucked straight from the tree in the garden. The shared shower (next to the dining room and with such low walls that my head was clearly visible to all when I was using it) was cold water only, a difficult sell that the owner had accomplished by extolling the health benefits of it coming straight from a mountain stream.
The village was on typical country time, with the streets deserted by 9PM and activity commencing at 5AM. The main (only?) restaurant in town had no menu, serving whatever the owners fancied making on the day. Unexpectedly it was closed on Saturday night, and my dinner that day was a packet of biscuits. Like in San Agustin, there was an enormous military presence, which I was told would be passing on in a day or two. Pride of the village was the thatched chapel, smartly
whitewashed and kept in good nick, that stands on the site of a colonial church. Gringos were clearly in short supply, as everyone wanted to chat, be it cafe owners, cafe customers, shop owners, museum curators, site guards, visiting groups of university students, etc.
This has actually been a hallmark of Colombia so far - the willingness of people to strike up a conversation with the tall, foreign-looking chap who has wandered briefly into their lives. I've never been in a country that's so friendly, and I don't say that lightly. There are many places where people are all smiles and will answer your questions if asked, but frankly that's the least I expect of people - as a grumpy, anti-social person by nature, I can still provide a smile and directions to the nearest loo so I expect the rest of humankind to do likewise. However for people to make the effort to have a chat with the stranger in their midst is something different entirely, and I've never had so many random interactions with local people in all my travels as I've had here. It goes without saying that none of them have had an ulterior motive.
Barring some misfortune in the next couple of weeks, this will go down as one of the stand-out features of the country.
Tierradentro is the region in which San Andres sits, its indigenous inhabitants being the Paez Indians whose fighting ferocity enabled them to remain free of Spanish subjugation longer than many of their contemporaries. Archaeologically, the area is famous for its underground tombs, painted in various colours and depicting geometric motifs as well as animals. Like at San Agustin, little is known about the civilisation that created them other than that its peak was reached about 1,000 years ago. Monoliths have been found at Tierradentro suggesting influence from San Agustin, but the two civilisations were essentially separate.
There are two tourist loops from San Andres taking in the closest tomb sites. You can do both in one day but, with the weather warm and sunny, I opted to do them over two. The first was spent visiting the museum and the sites of Alto de Segovia, Alto del Duende, and El Tablon. Segovia was comfortably the most interesting of all the sites I saw in Tierradentro, from a visual point of view. Several of the tombs at
Segovia are lit so, after clumping down the large stone steps, you can take in the setting in one go rather than via the teasing circular revelations you get with a torch. Geometric patterns covered the walls and ceilings, with the occasional humanoid face painted in. It was no coincidence that the unlit tombs at Segovia, and all the (unlit) tombs at El Duende, were much less interesting. The site at El Tablon consisted of a few standing figures, none in particularly great condition and having a historical significance vastly exceeding their so-so appearance.
The site guards all said that they could spend days at their posts without seeing a tourist. As a result, they were all eager to talk, and I learned from one that Barack Obama was now president of the USA, a fact which had managed to pass me by since I left Popayan. One of the other guards asked me if there were poor people in England, a touching question which I struggled to answer, the obvious reply of "Yes" requiring an explanation of the welfare state that had me reaching for the dictionary too often to have any continuity. The average Colombian salary is
maybe $300 per month yet all the guards professed themselves happy with their jobs and lives.
Day 2 saw me visiting the site of Alto de San Andres, at which I saw precisely nothing because the guard never showed up to unlock the gates, and then the site of Alto del Aguacate (meaning "the avocado" for reasons unknown) located high on a ridge, where there were unlit tombs that some long exposure photos revealed contained more figures and paintings but none of the complexity of Segovia.
However, for the non-archaeologists among us, there was at least as much enjoyment to be had hiking the trails between the sites, with the countryside a glorious mix of highlands and valleys. Shiny coffee plants were arrayed across sloping fields, with colourful butterflies flitting amongst the vegetation. Condors soared overhead, their presence being announced by a sudden shadow passing over you in startling fashion. From El Aguacate, I could see into the neighbouring valley, with a toy town half way up the opposite wall. I saw hardly anyone else on my wanderings, with even locals being few and far between, and the appearance of four English-speaking teenage backpackers in the hospedaje that
evening made me half-suspect someone had activated an infinite improbability drive.
Pleasant though San Andres was, cold showers and inconsistent meal availability were not likely carrots to keep me there, and after my two days of hiking I prepared to return to a world in which an Obama presidency-to-be offered promise of making it A Better Place.
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