The little town of Popayan is not much to see. Well, that´s not fair. It´s a fairly impressive collection of colonial architecture but not much else. It´s also a pretty religious city and I arrived late on through to Monday´s religious festival as well. There was literally nothing to do in this town. I ate lunch and dinner at the same two restaurants two nights in a row and the highlight of the weekend was watching a morose, young couple get married. They looked so bored with each other already that it was depressing just to watch them and their unsmiling gaze as they posed for pictures. The guests looked like they arrived after a night out of hitting the clubs, decked out in their poly-blend and sequenced, finest with camel toe in full view.
The next morning I began the 6 hour journey to San Augustin. The road there is so bumpy it is virtually impossible to read, write or even sleep and coming from a borderline narcoleptic like me that is saying alot. You have to keep your muscle very loose in order to avoid injury so everyone on the bus resembles epileptics flapping about with their eyes rolling back desperate for a few moments rest. The terrain, as usual, is stunning. Every pueblo has their makeshift futboll fields with sugarcane goals. White calla lillies grow by the road side and farms of strawberry fields, go on..well..forever. Roadblocks are common between the police and guerillas and the farmers take advantage of this captive bus audience to sell their delicious little wares.
Finally you arrive in the charming little town of San Agustin. Famous for its proximity to The Parque Arqueologico with over 100, unexplained Eastern Island-esque statues some 3300 years old. It´s also famous for a type of mushroom, for which many believe the creators of these statues were on.
After checking into Casa de Francois, an amazing little mountain refuge on a small coffee farm, I wandered the grounds and then down to the town below. Francois is an older French hippie who has been living up there for the last 16 years. His gorgeous house is the perfect balance of roughing it and modern ammentities. Indoor plumbing under a thatched roof and cold beers from the fridge while lounging in a hammock..what more can you ask for?
The town is a little gem too. A real cowboy paradise. My first sight in the town was of two little boys sharing a horse and their older brother napping on another with a rump for a pillow. They offered me a tour of the town on horseback which I politely declined. Obviously they´ve been around horses all of their short lives and even though Im sure they´re deft handlers, something about riding around on a horse with a 7 year old doesn´t appeal to me.
I was sent out as a scout to find mushrooms for the trip to the Parque Arqueologico and ended up meeting a group of guys who had a farm where we could pick them ourselves. I went back to collect the four Irish people I had befriended and we all went on a mushroom picking adventure. We hung out on this farm drinking beers and dancing salsa on the porch with our new friends mustering the energy to go picking. We only found four though so the bounty was short but we did get to wander through coffee fields, orange and lemon groves, blackberry bushes and the roost of a 19 round undefeated champion cock fighter. I held him for a photo and got scratched so Im sure I have some kind of bird flu by now. Time will tell…
