Happy Birthday Mom! A little belated but I was thinking it when I woke up on the 25th (of April).
Today would be my first full day in San Agustin and I was looking forward to taking it easy and seeing some archeological artifacts.
Before heading out from La Casa de Francois though Devi and I would eat breakfast and slowly get organized to start our day. We also started to discuss with Francois and consult our books in order to figure out how to get from San Agustin to the Colombia/Ecuador border. Devi’s Colombian visa would expire on Tuesday (I think that’s when it was) and we had made plans to meet up with Elena in San Agustin before heading off to Ecuador together. The more we learned the more we realized that it was going to be very very difficult to get to the border in one day from San Agustin. There were really two options, either we could go North again to Popayan, four hours in the wrong direction and then take a bus to the border or we could take a bus through the mountains via Macoa. Neither option really sounded that great as they would both be long trips and take two days to complete. Coupled with the fact that it was strongly advised to not approach or cross the border at night things were getting slightly complicated. I’ll get back to this in a bit.
So, once we’d eaten and discussed some of our next moves and options it was time to visit the Parque Arquelogico. The parque itself is not too far out of town so we hopped on a little bus and made our way there.
The park itself is laid out over quite a bit of land and has three places of interest. Each “place” however really just has more of the same, carved rock statues. The only not so cool thing about the whole setup is that the statues have all been positioned. Meaning that they are not in their original resting places. They were found and when it was decided to create a park for tourists the statues were moved around and positioned to make them more appealing to tourists. Additionally, there was very little information available about the statues and the people who made them.
Devi and I decided to be a bit rebellious and jump over many of the small wooden fence barriers so we could take some fun pictures with the statues. I’m pretty sure we weren’t the first ones to do that.
Once we finished walking the main spots of the park we visited the forest of the idols, which just like the other locations in the park is full of statues that have been positioned by the keepers at the park.
By the time we finished with the “forest” is getting late in the afternoon so we decided to head back into town and back to the hostel. As I mentioned earlier in the post Devi and I had started discussing how we would be getting to Ecuador from San Agustin in the following days. Due to the time constraint Devi was faced with, that evening she decided that she would be taking off the following morning, head for Pasto and spend the night there and then continue on to Ecuador on Tuesday. It turns out that we actually ran into Devi’s friend Jason, who I mentioned during my time spend in Bogota, and he would be going with her on the trip to Ecuador via Pasto. I, on the other hand, would spend the following day, Monday, in San Agustin and wait for Elena to arrive early Tuesday morning when we would then leave and take the same route to get to Ecuador. I know, it’s a little confusing and you can not imagine how much of a pain in the ass it was to try and figure all the logistics out.
That night we would then hang out with some nice people at the hostel enjoying some food and some rum. it was pretty mellow but we had some good conversations. I also made plans to check out some sights with a gent named Daryn the following day which would turn out to be pretty fun.
