vacation!

One weekend in February Bibi, Liz, Ingie, and I went away! (Liz and Ingie are two friends who worked with Formando Vidas during my first year here, and have since been in Wales and Canada, respectively. They were here for a visit.) We piled into Ruby "the Beast" and headed out mid-morning on Friday.
"What about the children?" you ask?
Well, Evi and Steve (my directors and neighbors) offered to take care of them for the weekend, with Tony and Laura helping out.
So, being the young, adventurous, single women that we are, we headed across Bogota and grabbed the highway toward Medellin. No, we didn't go THAT far... that's about a ten-hour drive! We just went a couple of hours, to Villeta, where the climate is so different that I was drenched with sweat!
We walked around to find a hotel for maybe a half-hour, then got changed and went to the pool! aaaaaahhh!
Day two, we went white water rafting! The Rio Negro (Black River) really is Negro, because of the rock that the mountains there are made of. The four of us, plus the guide, plus a co-guide, went in a raft together. We jumped out and practiced "rescuing" each other on the calm bits of the river, which turned out to be a good thing because at one big rock, the whole raft flipped over!
After quickly getting out from underneath it, I stuck my feet out in front of me, grabbed my oar, and floated along the fast river. It was great! Definitely worth 45,000 pesos! (about $25?) As we approached some small rapids, I started to get a bit nervous, thinking, "I have to go through that outside of the boat?!" But then I was close to the other raft and they dragged me in, where Liz already was seated. Soon my raft pulled up, and I scrambled across!
Later we got to jump out and swim around a bit, and shortly after that the tour was done! All told, I suppose it lasted only an hour or so. The place we disembarked was in the little town that Mom, Dad, J. and I stayed at when they visited me a eyar and a half ago! We got out of the rafts at the same bridge where my parents and I picked up rocks to take as keepsakes. The guide said that further down the river there are class 5 rapids (where two rivers join, I think), and that crazy american kayak-ers travel there to attempt dangerous maneuvers.
The next day we got up and walked through town to the train tracks. Our mission: to get to the "balneario", the locals' swimming hole. At the tracks we waited for a little cart to arrive that would take us there. It was a platform with three rustic benches and the driver's seat at the back, propelled by a motorcycle motor. We paid 5,000 pesos (less than $3) round-trip and sped through the lush green thickets, stopping a couple of times for carts that were coming toward town to move off the tracks so we could continue on. We stopped by some little houses and a bit of a clearing, arranged for the driver to pick us up in an hour, and walked down the bank to the river.
We were the first ones to arrive that Sunday morning, at quarter-past-nine. Only a few people who live there and sell snacks to the bathers were setting up their chairs and starting fires to cook corn on the cob. Wading up to our ankles, knees, through the strongest part of the current where Ingie fell down and we all died laughing... we went right up to the "falls" and one by one, stuck our heads under the water, feeling the cold weight of it pounding down on us.
Soon it was time to head back to town on the little motorcart, get our things ready, and drive back to Bogota.