San Agustín
COLOMBIA
Angry Bums
By LYNDI
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
My butt is angry at me. And after what I put it through the past three days, I really can’t blame it.
It all started with our departure from Bogotá. We took an overnight bus to San Agustín in southern Colombia expecting a long, 8 hour ride. It ended up being 10 butt-numbing hours with approximately 2 of those actually spent sleeping. You see, the problem wasn’t exactly the bus – Colombia’s buses are actually very nice (and for what we’re paying for them, they’d better be), but rather the driver. For some reason that I may never fully understand, all Latin American drivers blast their favorite artists’ greatest hits so the entire bus full of passengers can enjoy it as well. Enjoy it LOUDLY as well. And overnight buses are no exception. The bus driver sits up front with his other bus driver buddy, talking and playing loud music throughout the whole bus while all the passengers try to get some sleep. It’s never quite successful. The other problem was the open door. The door you climb up to board the bus is actually behind the driver, so during the night he’d let passengers on and off and completely forget to close the door so that the brisk, cold air flows throughout the entire coach. Ah well. As Aaron and I always say now, at least it wasn’t a chicken bus.
So we arrived in San Agustín around 8:30am and were immediately approached by about 3 travel agencies trying to sell us on their tours of the famous archaelogical park nearby. One guide, Santo, was especially persistent and not only followed us around the town while we looked for a hostel, but then hung out at the hostel while we put our things in our room. While putting things away, we discovered we’d left our bag of food on the bus and had to go to the bus depot to retrieve it. On our way back, who should show up on motorcycle to help escort us home? But Santo!! After trying to sell us on more tours, he finally left us alone and we crashed hard for a 5 hour nap.
Once we woke up refreshed, we decided to go visit some travel agencies about tours to the nearby ruins. We were in one agency trying to figure out the cryptic pricing, when who should show up? But Santo!! Muy bien! All the explanations of the pricing seemed a bit shady, so we told them that we’d think about it and come back later. So Aaron and I headed to an internet cafe to look up tours online, when who should show up? But Santo!! We finally agreed on a quasi-legal tour where we would hire him without going through the travel agency and save ourselves about 10,000 pesos – so everyone was happy.
So 9am the next morning, Santo met us outside our hostel with our transportation for the day – two lovely horses. Aaron’s was Princesa and mine was Constantino. It would not be long before Constantino made it clear that we were not going to be friends. For some reason, Constantino always had to be in front of Aaron’s and Santo’s horses. If he saw one approaching from the rear, he’d either cut them off or start galloping. This is where my butt becomes even angrier.
We started our tour riding uphill through muddy terrain before we came to our first site where several pre-Incan statues had been unearthed and were now standing underneath a shelter. Little is actually known about the civilization that created these monuments, but it seems to be almost a mix of the Mayan culture with the same calendars and ability to read the skies, and the Incas with their carvings and village structure. At the first site there was a young woman who would explain the complicated calendars and tell you what your birth sign was. It was all very confusing, but apparently I’m a “Wizard” who has to find a balance between humility and arrogance and has a great affinity for discovery and water. Pretty dead on, really. There are 260 different signs a person can be born under which will dictate what kind of a person they will be. I don’t know how much of it I believed (even though it sort of nailed me), but very interesting nonetheless.
The second site we went to was the most spectacular of them all. Several statues were carved into the stones over a stunning canyon with the Rio Magdalena flowing through it, all of them amazingly still detailed. On our way to the next site, it began to rain pretty hard, so we pulled over at a little shelter (where a local lady just happened to be selling chicha – the local alcoholic drink made out of fermented corn. A little too convenient), and after a few drinks, we were off again. But I believe this was the turning point in my and Constantino’s relationship. From then on, whenever I tried to mount the horse, he would casually start walking when I had just one foot in the stirrup, causing all sorts of problems and near-spills. Then he began to go his own pace, regardless of how fast or slow I wanted to go. Sometimes we’d saunter, sometimes a good gallop, and once a full on sprint. I believe the sound that came out of my mouth was something of a mix between a terrified scream and the sound Wile E. Coyote makes when he falls off cliffs. But we all finally arrived at the third site in one piece where the most intact statues were situated. In fact, these statues still had the original color on them, which is amazing considering they were painted in the first century.
So finally our tour was concluded and we rode our sore buns back to the town of San Agustín where I bid a good riddance to Constantino and a final goodbye to Santo. He ended up being quite a good guide, just annoying as anything when he was trying to get our business. We spent that evening cooking up a nice feast and playing several card tournaments before calling it a night.
The final cruel test we put our glutes through was the busride from San Agustín to our next stop in Popayan. The distance is only 127km – surely nothing more than a 2 1/2 hour ride, right? Well, it just so happened that the road between the two towns was quite possibly the worst road I’d ever been on. And we saw some bad roads in Central America. Aaron and I got seats in the very back row which, of course, are the worst possible seats to take for a bumpy ride since the back of the bus ricochets off the ditches more. At any rate, 5 1/2 hours later, we pulled into Popayan completely bruised and battered, but we’d survived. And our buns are all the stronger for it.
