Guatape and El Pinon

Hopping onto a bus around noon we were on our way to Guatape - a small town beside a very big rock. I mean, really big. So big you have to climb almost 700 stairs to get to the top. A rock that sits on a beautiful landscape dotted with amazing blue-green lakes.

It is a three hour journey on winding, car-sick inducing roads to get there. We knew the town was supposed to be a very colourful and were excited to see it. Although there are many colourful towns in Colombia, Guatape is supposed to stand above the rest. As we passed by one colourful town, the bus stopped for a few seconds, a handful of people got off and we continued on.

The three of us (our friend was still visiting from back home) looked at each other and wondered if that was our stop. Since we were out in the middle of nowhere our phones had no GPS to tell us where we were exactly, and no announcement was made as to the location. Buying a bus ticket to Guatape, we foolishly assumed that it would be the final stop. It wasn’t.

I walked up to the bus driver and in my broken Spanish told him we were supposed to get off at Guatape, he laughed and said that the bus turns around at the end of the road. So I sat down and told the others ,and we waited. Fortunately only about 25 minutes down the road another bus was going the opposite direction and the driver of our bus waved it down.

We switched over to that bus and were glad we didn’t have to wait the entire ride, as we had no idea how far it would have taken us. We arrived BACK in Guatape and chatted with some other tourists there, they said they made the exact same mistake. That night we went to bed early, since we had an enormous rock to climb the next day.

Riding a tuk-tuk up to the bottom of the rock, we were amazed at how actually big it was! We paid our entry fee and headed up to the top. The views were beautiful and the rock was astounding. Check out the pictures from the top. There are actually restaurants up there as well, and someone has to carry the food and drinks up everyday on their back, its amazing.

We settled down after the climb to a nice meal and of course a couple beers to end the day.