One Week Colombia

The week before eastern I went with my mom to Colombia, visiting my sister. She is currently taking a gap year to do voluntary work in the social sector. Anyway, the week started off amazingly! She lives in Bogotá, the capital of Colombia. The city is gigantic and absolutely stunning, as it has two sides to it. The one side looks extremely wealthy as it has a lot of beautiful houses and parks. But on the other side, there is the bigger poor part. When you walk down the streets in Germany and you think, wow this is a huge pothole, than this is nothing against it! What they call pothole in Europe is just a little unevenness in the road, it´s ridiculous. But here is the thing, they simply don´t have enough money to fix the street or to take care of them. There are many crazy (and unfortunately sad) things to see, such as big piles of rubbish next to a cow on the meadow in the middle of the city. It´s weird to picture, but I definitely haven´t seen it before!
My sister, guiding us through the city, introduced us to a lot of delicious dishes. My favourites were Arepa's (south american corn cakes) and Hugo de lulo (a juice or milkshake made out of the lulo fruit).
She took us as well to one of the highest points (Monserrate) in Bogotá were you have an amazing view over the whole city and you can see that Bogotá is basically build on a high plateau! It´s crazy how gigantic this city is!

During our stay in Colombia we went as well to the mysterious El Dorado. Well it wasn´t as mysterious as imagined, but it was beautiful indeed! Actually we planned on renting jet skies, but sadly they didn´t offer them during the week. Pooo :(
But we made the best out of it, had a lovely view over the lake, did a little bit of hiking and just looked at gorgeous little shops.

We did a two days trip to Tobia, which is a little tiny village in (as I would describe it) the jungle. The nature was just absolutely overwhelming! I like to compare it with the planet Pandora (the movie is called AVATAR), because it´s just a wide spread of different green colours and flowers and just plants overall! It was absolutely amazing and it reminded me of why I am so much in love with traveling <3

When we got there, the first thing we noticed, the transporter ( / Taxi / broken car) played us!! ( Well exchanged in Euros it was only 50 ct, but still!!). But we didn´t let us bring down by that. We decided to do some very cool activities and our decision fell on rafting. It has been one of the coolest things I have done so far in my life because it´s really fun and unpredictable! I quite like the adrenaline it´s giving you, you are just in the moment and feel your heart beating as fast as it can. I love the energy you get out of it. While we rode (if you can call it like that) down the river, on my left side I saw a man. Well that doesn´t sound to scary, BUT he was topless, he was holding a living fish in his left hand and in the right hand he hold a knife. You are safe to say that it scared the crap out of me. Anyways, as the river is called Rio Negro, you can imagine what our shirts looked like. I´m not kidding, but my shirt wasn´t white anymore, oh well..:D

We signed up for a second activity as well, but again they played us. In the magazine it said canyoning, we in our wild fantasies imagined something cool with climbing rocks, jumping down a waterfall (the magazine had a picture of it), dive into a natural pool.. well you get the idea, something adventurous. It turned out that canyoning is called a walk next to the river. Of course we questioned this but we got a simple answer that they got complaint as it is to dangerous to actually do a real canyoning, but they simply couldn´t fix the magazine. It got a little bit frustrating, but we survived it.

Since we thought that spending the night in a jungle would be a cool idea, we rented tents on a Finka (which is a little cabin/open house on a farm or just on a meadow in our case). Sadly the Finka had not stored any food, what caused us to go to sleep hungrily. Before that, a enormous cloudburst came down! I have never ever seen it raining so much in that little amount of time (it literally went from sunshine to rain in a matter of seconds). I quite enjoyed the rain as it smells lovely and feels good. I took the time and read "the perks of being a wallflower" now I am proud to call it as one of my favourite books! (: The night was super cold, but all in all it was a wonderful experience!

The last highlight of the week was the day in the cloud forest! I have never seen something like this in my life! It was forest, starting at the top of a mountain and going down in a valley, full covered in fog. It was so weird and inconceivable. It was a really good exercise as well, haha. You might think it only goes down if you are starting at the top, but no, that´s not the case. It has it´s up and downs but it was all worth it! It just makes you really love nature as you see it´s true beauty just by leaves and how they are created. I know we have nature in Germany as well haha, but it´s by far not the same! I loved it. We even did this crazy thing (I don´t remember it´s name) where you get a climbing harness which is connected to a steel cable and you just jump into nothing. As well, one of the coolest things I have ever done!! 

Ahh I am in love with this country, even if it was the first time I visited, but the variety of nature truly fascinated me. I plan going back there, not in the near future, but at some time (: