June 4, 2018 – June 6, 2018

We left Mompox and headed towards the city of Bucaramanga. We had plans to camp at Finca Carajo, a small farm in a cloud forest that had a few hiking trails, and we were excited to get to some cooler temperatures. We made it to the beautiful city of Bucaramanga, where I saw that there were two routes up into the mountains surrounding the city. The recommended one would get us out of the city faster, but then showed miles and miles of curving, switched back roads. The second route would keep us in the city longer, but the mountain road looked much straighter. We chose the second route.

The route climbed the sides of the bowl that the city sat in and the road became narrower, the corners tighter. Just as we were about to leave the city limits, we were stopped by a group of men who advised us that we shouldn’t take the route we were on, that we were too big. Indeed, the road that disappeared into the trees ahead looked narrow, and very steep…no wonder it looked straighter on the map, the people who put it through apparently didn’t bother putting in any switchbacks!

The young men programmed a better route into my phone (the original route recommended), and after 15 additional minutes of city driving, we were on a paved, four-laned road that climbed up and up, providing great views of the city below.

The driveway for the farm we were to camp at was about 2 km long and consisted of two concrete tracks that switchbacked up to the farm. The turns in the driveway were tight and we had to do three- and five-point turns at some of them to get around the corners. But we arrived to a great spot to camp for a couple of nights, with 360 degree views and temperatures cool enough to warrant a light sweater if you were standing around in the early morning air.

We had planned to hike to a mirador on the property the next morning, but we ended up spending some time getting the camper reorganized, and by then the clouds had moved in….by which I mean, the very ground we were standing on was enveloped in clouds (which is why they call these areas “cloud forests”) and on the advice of Rosie, who ran the place, we instead hiked on a trail down through some forest, then to the bottom of the driveway and back. When we got back to the truck Rosie treated us to some cheesecake, we did some trip planning, and cooked ourselves a nice dinner.

The next morning we made sure to get up and on the trail early before the clouds moved in.

When we returned from the two or three hour hike we saw a group of people who had arrived, among them a young couple in wedding outfits wear. They had been married on the weekend but had put their outfits back on to come to the finca for a photo shoot. The sister and brother-in-law of the bride live in Washington D.C, and were surprised to see our Alberta plates. He is originally from Bolivia (a country we hope to visit in a few months), and she is from Colombia, and it was nice to get some advice from them on places to visit. Another of the guests, a brother of the groom, also had good English and was able to give us some really solid advice on out-of-the-way places to visit, roads to take, roads to avoid, and gave us his email and phone number. If we had any questions, problems, or needed a translator, we were to give him a call.

We got the truck ready for our departure, paid for our nights and were about to pull out when a young worker from the finca appeared at our truck window with freshly made, chilled glasses of home made raspberry juice….how very nice!

We waved goodbye to Rosie and her assistants, and to the young wedding party, and headed off to our next destination, Canon Chicamocha!

(This is a webcam video of our departure.  We had to stop at corners to take the truck out of 4 wheel drive in order to be able to negotiate the turns, then stop to put it back in 4  so we could use our lowest gear ratio to crawl our way down the driveway.  Luckily we didn’t encounter any oncoming traffic!  The video is playing at 3 times the actual speed….if you want to play it faster, you can by clicking play, then clicking on the gear symbol in the lower right hand corner of the video, to the left of the YouTube banner.)