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Held hostage by health conscious locals!
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It was a struggle to get up early again so we only made it to the bus station in Popayan for 8am in the end. We bought our tickets for the hour and a half journey to Silvia and settled into the minibus. The journey was pretty uneventful, as usual we were the only gringos and as usual we passed lots of checkpoints. We arrived in the little town at about ten o´clock and just as our guide book promised the roads leading to the main square were fringed with stalls and there were indigenous Indians everywhere.
There are about 12,000 Guambiano Indians living in the hills around Silvia and every Tuesday they come into town to do their shopping. They all dress alike with men wearing wraparound skirts and the women sporting black and white loose skirts, blue and pink woolen ponchos and lots of strings of white beads around their necks. They all wear hats - not quite bowlers, but like a cross between those and trilbys.
They´re notoriously camera-shy and so we spent a couple of hours wandering around and surreptitiously snapping away. You could tell that market day was a big day out with a lot of socialising going on. The women gathered to chat and spin wool (some chatted on their mobiles too which looked quite out-of-character!) and the men watched various salesmen´s pitches.
The funniest of these took place outside the church. A middle-aged Colombian man enlisted a teenage lad to help him demonstrate the powers of some bright green cream he was selling. We gathered it was supposed to make you big and strong like him - he made the youth take off his t-shirt and then proceeded to talk the crowd through various aspects of his anatomy. He had the poor lad doing exercises and trying to floor him like a circus strongman.
We watched this guy for about half an hour the locals were engrossed just like us and loads of them bought pots of the suspicious looking stuff from this Andean Del Boy. It was cool to see that markets the world over are the same at heart.
After we´d seen enough we decided to get the bus back to Popayan. It was 11:30, we had tickets for the twelve o´clock. We grabbed a coffee and then got on board. We were really pleased that as all the seats were taken, we set off five minutes early. Just a few hundred metres from the edge of town though we were stopped by a roadblock.
We didn´t really know what was going on - I saw a couple of people drawing their fingers across their throats and I jumped to the conclusion that there had been a murder. We were quite nervous as there were a number of heavily armed soldiers in the town and we didn´t know whether it was guerillas or government troops and were imagining all sorts of dangerous things.
After some debate we drove back into the town and there was talk of us having to pay an extra 3,000 pesos each (the whole journey was only costing 4,500 pesos each), but this soon changed to us all having to get off the bus and being given refunds. Everyone was saying we wouldn´t leave until much later or even tomorrow if we were lucky.
When we finally managed to get someone to explain very slowly in Spanish what was going on it turned out it wasn´t anything to do with the country´s 40 long civil war, but was instead some local people protesting by holding up the traffic in order to get a new hospital in town. No that´s what I call direct action!
We were held up for nearly 3 hours, but we did manage to get some lunch and see more brightly dressed locals hanging out. We also saw them loading up the old wooden Chivas (brightly painted wooden buses with open sides) with all their purchases before heading back into the hills. Some of them defied the laws of gravity and I´m quite certain the laws of the road.
It was a great day out, but we were nervous that being held up for so long would mean we´d have lost the Galapagos bargain we´d spent hours researching the day before. Fortunately we got back to an email message saying it was all going ahead. Yippee! We leave on Saturday and are very excited.
At dinner that night we bumped into Daniel, our Swiss friend from San Agustin, again. We had a great meat-rich meal and a few beers. We got back to our hostel shortly after 11pm, little realising that we´d breached the curfew. Thank goodness some other gringos were still up to let us in.
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| 144. | Held hostage by health conscious locals! - Silvia, Colombia Apr 24, 2007 (  16 ) |
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