Minca Minca Minca Minca

This entry is going to lump together a few recent events and travels, so bear with me... I've been too busy having adventures to stop and write about them!

Anyway. Santa Marta is hot. Hot hot hot. Here are some bits of evidence of just how hot it is here:

1. Lach has stopped wearing underpants.

2. I wear headbands to keep my hair from sticking to my face.

3. Street dog testicles hang much lower than they did in Cuenca.

To escape the heat, we've been traveling around the region every few days, intermingled with rest days in Santa Marta and working with the organization Mariposas Amarillas, where I began volunteering this week as well (more details on that endeavor soon). This is the region of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, the coastal mountain range that rises up just inland from the sea; it's one of the few places in the world where you can stand on a tropical beach and see snow-capped mountains in the distance:

Taken from "surf camp" last week - 3 days of mosquito nets, waves, and getting sore arms from paddling!

This weekend, we headed to Minca, just about a half-hour's drive up into the mountains. The temperature difference was crazy, considering we could still see Santa Marta right from the backyard of the guesthouse...

Getting to Minca: The 5000-peso "colectivos" are basically the cars/SUVs/motorcycles of anybody who shows up at the designated corner in Santa Marta, where, by some unspoken agreement, everyone seems to know that the transports for Minca leave from. In the case of the cars/SUVs, they leave when... they're full. So that's how we ended up bouncing around like popcorn in the back of this jeep, trying to dodge the rain leaking through the roof as we bumped along on the half-paved roads...

According to Lach, this next one is a "very good representation" of what the last part of the jeep ride was actually like:

But really.. the ride was a great way to see a bit more of Colombia (especially inland from the coast). And Minca itself was awesome! We stayed at a lovely place called the Mirador (so named for the Santa Marta view, shown above) and met cool people there, and on Sunday we all hiked together to Pozo Azul, a bunch of waterfalls and swimming holes in the river nearby. Jumping off rocks into the deep water below was an awesome adrenaline rush...

...and the whole day was spent swimming, diving, rock-hopping and exploring. Mom, I think you would really like Colombia!!

Just a few more snapshots of the day/weekend: Lach poses beside some "stairs" made of tires, filled up with rainwater...

On the way to the falls, we saw a new bridge being built. We did some surmising about how they would test the bridge once they got the first planks across... and hypothesized that perhaps they would send the work donkey across first just to make sure it held. Poor thing.

Is it a bridge over troubled water... or a troubled bridge over water?

Tomorrow I head out on the 5-day trek to Ciudad Perdida. More updates to follow upon my return to the land of internet on Saturday!