A Break from the Cities

Trip Start May 26, 2007
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Trip End Ongoing


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Flag of Colombia  ,
Wednesday, November 7, 2007

San Cristobal is not exactly the conventional day out. We arrive at the 'Train Station' because that is the only means by which you can enter the village. However, instead of catchin a train you pay a guy a few bucks to jump on a starange cart, which is basically the combination of a platform of wood on wheels attatched to a moped. We jump on and start flying down the rails until we start comin head on with another cart. I thought at this point that the ingenious idea to access the village was hugely flawed until the oncoming cart stopped and the guy driving it lifted it off the tracks while we went past. This made me consider just how securely these carts were attatched to the tracks, but then the driver floored it and i was too busy yelling "Woohee" to think about it.

The actual town is one sandy, rocky street with a bunch of wooden huts unevenly spread down it 1 The cart
1 The cart
 . And while it definately had the whole old, rustic, rickety village thing going for it, it also had one other thing. Tyres. Me linz and Andy (Aussie chick we met in Cali) all grabbed a big inflatable tyre and went roaring down the adjacent river. There were multiple occasions where you found yourself with no choice but to yell out "Sticks! STICKS!" before being plummeted by the currents into a massive bail of sticks and branches from an overhanging tree. The word sticks was also often replaced with the word 'rocks', 'logs' or 'linz'. There was one rock in particular tha made quite the impact, both on the day and on the spine. It stood on its own a couple of feet above its surrounding rocks but the current was still strong enough to send water over the top of it. So we line it up, linz hits it on an angle and is flipped like a pancake onto a pile of rocks, and i hit it dead on and somehow end up getting shipwrecked right on top and we needed a vine in the shape of a lassoo to get me down.
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