After having great few days in Bogota, we were ready to head back into the wilderness. Bogota stop was successful. We managed to run few errands and found few items that we couldn’t find since we left the states.
The first stop on our way south was a unique national park called Sumapaz. It is a large páramo ecosystem located in the Altiplano Cundiboyacense mountain range, considered the largest páramo ecosystem in the world. It was declared a National Park of Colombia in 1977 because of its importance as a biodiversity hotspot and main source of water for the most densely populated area of the country, the Bogotá savanna.
The main plant in Sumapaz National Park is the Frailejón (genus Espeletia). These endangered, sunflower-family plants look like stubby palm trees with soft, woolly leaves. They act as giant sponges that absorb water from the fog to feed Colombia’s water supply. The Whole park is covered in these beauties and it creates a uniques landscape that’s hard to see anywhere else in the world
As beautiful and unique as it is, it is also remote and has been used by armed illegal groups for human, drugs and weapon trafficking. That’s why the military presence was really visible in this remote part of Colombia. There were many military checkpoints along the way and as we were moving deeper in the national park, there were less cars and people and the checkpoints became more serious. We had a photo with one of the first group of soldiers at the first checkpoint. Like everywhere in Colombia, everyone who we met at checkpoints were nice and kind.
The landscape we were witnessing was like nothing that we have seen so far.. The deeper we were getting into the park, it was getting less crowded. We were planning to go on an offroad route to a small village out of the national park and from there we could continue on the highway. We had a whole day of driving ahead of us and the checkpoint were slowing our pace.
It was already after lunch when we got out of the national park boundary. The landscape has changed as we were driving down the high altitude and there were lots of farms just outside the national park. It was still stunning. The clouds were moving low above the valleys as we climbed up and down the valleys to reach our to next destination
That day by far we had one of our most stunning drive of the whole trip across Panamericana. It was around 4:00 pm and we were getting close to the only town on our route. We were eagerly looking forward to arriving and having a late lunch there. As we went through the last kilometer, we saw a sign of under construction. We couldn’t believe what was in front of our eyes!!!
The tiny dirt road that we were following up and down the mountains for the last 5 hours ended up to this road work with no alternative route around it. It was just not believable. We left the car and tried to walk into town. It seemed that they closed our dirt road to pour some cement and it was closed for the business. No one was crazy enough to drive the road that we used to reach this town so they didn’t think it can make any problem to close off this tiny muddy road. Well it made a huge problem for us. We had to drive all the way back to where we started just south of Bogota in the morning. And the highway was few hundred meter from us over the construction site.
We were tired, hungry and couldn’t figure out what to do. We walked to the town and had a quick lunch and talked to two policemen. It took them a while to understand our problem after few seconds they looked at each other and then smiled at us and said, welcome to Colombia!! There we knew that they only way forward is driving back. We stayed on side of the dirt track just before the roadblock for the night.
The next morning was a beautiful day and after a good night sleep we started to look at this on a positive note. It was one of the best drives that we have done so far so it wasn’t that bad to drive it once more. It wasn’t as fuggy as the last day and we managed to see some part of the road in a totally different light. After another long day of driving we called it a day as soon as we got to the main road and stayed in a gas station for the night.
In the next post, we are heading toward an interesting part of Colombia and of course we will chose a scenic route to get there. Let’s see how it works for us next time 😉
