Cali, Colombia

We arose to a gorgeous sunrise today, partly shrouded in mist, facing a long day of driving. Since we had failed to make it all the way to Medillin yesterday, we still had to find our way through that city (of 2.4 million) before pushing towards Cali. We are moving fast trying to make it to Quito to meet Noah’s friend Dave by the tenth. So while we have a little leeway in our itinerary, we wanted to get to Quito and settle in before he arrived.

We immediately started coming down in elevation until we hit a large, long valley. It almost reminded me of Vail valley, with houses going up each side, only to hit near vertical faces where building higher just wasn’t possible. After missing a critical turn, we zig-zagged our way through the town for about an hour before getting spit out on the far end back on the pan-american highway and towards Cali.

Shortly after, it was time to start climbing again, unbeknown to us, just the first of many enormous valleys we would snake our way around. The valleys here are indescribably large. I have traveled around a major portion of the Rocky Mountains and just have not seen anything on this scale. I look at the pictures and they just don’t convey the scale of how deep the river gorges are, or how steep the hillsides are. The only place that begins to compare is Alaska. The only difference here is that the roads go right up and over the mountains, not through the river valleys like I’m used to. These steep and tight roads make the roads I drive everyday back in Colorado look like Nebraska… (for those outside of the States, a flat, featureless agricultural state next to Colorado)

After snaking along coffee covered ridges that dropped off thousands of feet on either side for the better part of the day, we finally came down into an extremely wide valley, flanked by large mountain ranges on either side. As soon as we hit the flatland, we started seeing sugarcane for as far as we could see. The road was finally flat and straight and we were able to make up some time and as it was getting dark we entered into Cali, another large city that is known for its liberal adoption of plastic surgery. We immediately hit rush hour traffic, so we bailed into the first hotel that we could easily park in front of to check it out.

We were greeted by a nice man who after realizing we didn’t speak great Spanish went scurrying off to find his wife, who spoke pretty good English. After looking at the room, we weren’t impressed and were going to move on, but first we needed to find an ATM since we were running low on Colombian pesos. The old couple told us about a few options that we could walk to that were safe, so we went and got some cash, and when we returned, the couple insisted that we stay. They were just too cute to say no to, so we ended up over-paying for what the room was, but the hospitality made up for the less than ideal accommodations.