San Gil

ABOUT SAN GIL:
San Gil is a small town in the Yariguíes Mountains of eastern Colombia, founded in 1689. During the build-up to Colombian independence, the town was an important gathering point for many native people from surrounding areas who would then march on Bogotá. Now it is famous as being the adventure capital of the region, and there are several outdoor activities available for visitors such as rafting, hiking and caving.

Today was a rough day, my roommate had set his alarm even earlier than mine, to 3:30 am and with c11 hours of driving plus breaks ahead of us. I attempted to get some sleep once we were on the truck, but to say the roads were bumpy would be an understatement!

We have been separated into 4 teams to cook meals for the group, I have been allocated team one, with Sibal and Jennifer. We have one fewer team members than the other teams but an easier list of meals to prepare, today’s lunch and tomorrow’s breakfast and lunch. Jazz had already done the shopping for today’s lunch, therefore, we only needed to chop for the ham, cheese, and salad sandwiches.

Back on the road again after lunch, we had one more stop, which was at a shopping centre, for the first three teams to buy the supplies for their meals. After which we drove through to our campsite, although we had to stop several times due to Ian still throwing up, and we made it to camp at 7 pm, with its starting to rain. Our campsite is a coffee and cattle farm outside town, with a cool decommissioned bus used for a communal area. San Gil is our first location where we have camp; it was a race to get the tents setup to beat the rain and the dark. These tents are significantly harder to erect then the ones provided by Intrepid in Africa!

As it’s always a long day for Dragoman, the owner always provides a vegetarian Indian buffet, which was delicious! As San Gil is the outdoor capital of Colombia and a mecca for extreme-sports enthusiasts, the owner gave us a a run down of all the options available. I chose to do white water raftering the next day and a combination of caving, cannoning, rock jumping etc. the next day.

It was an early start (6:30 am) for team one, as we had to prepare the breakfast and a packed lunch for everyone. For breakfast worked together and we cooked everyone scrambled eggs and a fruit salad, we severally overestimated how much everyone would eat and there was plenty of leftovers. For lunch we had bought cooked chickens, which we cut up with cheese and salad with tortillas.

With the meal prep over, I got ready for white water rafting, as at 9:30 we had to walk down to the main road, catch a local bus to the San Gil station. From there we had a 1 ½ hour drive to start point of the rafting, the distance wasn’t very far, but it was very bad roads!

I have done rafting previously at Victoria Falls, however, while I had fun, it was not the best because we had four girls from Norway on

one side and a the other too strong, so we were very off balance. This time it was fantastic, it was mostly made up of grade 3 and 4 rapids, however, there was two grade 5 rapids and one 5+, that was deemed too dangerous, so we had to get out and walk around it. At the end they had lunch ready with a cerveza.

We made it back to the campsite at 7:00 pm, just in time as a massive thunderstorm hit. Dinner was meant to be served at 7:30 pm but team two were late and we didn’t eat until 8:30 pm, but it was a good spaghetti bolognaise.

After the long day yesterday, myself and Jennifer decided not do to the caving, cannoning, rock jumping etc. today. Instead everyone was going to walk over to the nearby town, Barichara. Barichara is considered one of Colombia’s most beautiful municipalities with the best preserved Colonial town centers. It was declared a National Monument in 1975 and is truly an architectural testimony of Colonial days. We set off at 10 am for the walk over and again, this walk was very difficult, much more so than we had been lead to believe. We eventually made it to Barichara after lots of steeps hills and c13km at 1:30 to explore the town.