Purace, Colombia
Traveling to Popayan
January 4, 2008
The next morning I dragged myself out of bed at dawn and made my way down to the main square where I waited for the bus with four other Colombians. We waited until about 6:35am when the bus office opened and the guy made a phone call and told us that the bus never arrived at the city before us, he didn´t know what happened to the bus but it had never arrived. He got us tickets for the 9am bus and so we had to wait for about two hours. When 9am rolled around we got in the back of a pickup truck taxi and departed for the road junction outside of town where the bus would pick us up. Our truck kept picking up people until we had 8 people in the back with one kid hanging halfway outside the truck and at least six people inside the truck. Finally we arrived at the crossroads where they dropped us off to wait for the bus along with six soldiers that there were there just standing around and a few other people waiting for buses.
9:30am came and went and still no bus had arrived. Around then the soldiers decided that they would begin stopping traffic and proceeded to stop every car, truck, and motorcycle that went by, checking people´s papers, searching inside, on, and around the trucks, and even turning some people back. Around 10:15am our bus finally arrived and we threw our luggage in the back and continued on the road. Soon the paved portion of the road ended and we rounded the hillside to see with four-foot high piles of dirt on the right that had eroded from the sheer cliffs on the left. After 20 minutes of this we came to a little town and dropped some people off and picked some people up. At this point the bus attendant came by passing out plastic bags, if people wanted them, because apparently the road is so rough that people routinely vomit.
Once we left the town, the road quickly deteriorated and was unpaved and very rough for the next 5 hours. It was so rough that it was impossible to drink anything without spilling all over yourself. The scenery was spectacular though with lots of deep gorges covered by canopies of trees. Throughout the course of the trip I think we passed through almost all of the major climate zones as indicated by the vast difference in plant species. It varied from bizarre cloud forest to high altitude desert to lush green hillsides with cascading waterfalls in the shadow of Volcano Purace, which was shrouded in fog. Sadly, the road was too rough to even take pictures of this great scenery and I only managed a few pictures when we had to stop to let a truck pass by on a section of one-lane road. The bus almost got stuck a few times and I´m sure if it had been raining parts of the road would have been huge obstacles. Towards the end of the trip as we passed through a mountain town close to Popayan people sprayed the bus with water and a little girl with her window open got hit full on in the face; naturally everyone on the bus just laughed. The water spraying was due to the Carnaval de Blancos y Negros in town that would start the next day. When we finally arrived in Popayan it was about 4:30pm and after 7 hours of that tortuously rough road I decided that was enough bus travel for the day, I also didn´t want to arrive Pasto at 10pm at night on the eve of a huge celebration. Resigned to stay in Popayan for the festivities I made my way to find a place to stay.