El viaje

Caño Canoas is not really open for tourism. The entire area is „protected“ National Park. But since „ National Park „ also means there is no military and or police , it gives limitless possibilities to illegal farms, drug trade and settlers that just claim land for themselves. And these guys want to make money too, since the majority of their earnings are being payed to the local armed forces. It is neither stupid or dangerous to come here since tourism is encouraged from all sides , even in areas where „officially“ it should be illegal, because everybody is making their cut. Anjelica told us that from the 100.000 pesos entry fee , 80.000 goes to the guerrilleras..

Everybody warned us about the the condition of the roads after La Macarena so we left Jim and hoped on „ La Linea“, the local public transport. Or we tried to. We were supposed to leave at 7.30 but the weather and just the fact that we were in Colombia delayed the whole thing by two hours. That gave us time for coffee, a quick stroll through the rain,

and some very questionable breakfast.

It turns out the count of passengers was wrong , which delayed the whole thing again. We needed a second car , and knowing that we would spend the night there, we threw our backpack on top of the Jeeps and headed north.

We immediately realized we were in for a treat since 5 minutes after leaving the town we crossed the first dodgy bridge.

(We have videos of the dodgyness but since this is going to be a long post and videos mess up the upload time ,ill leave these for future story times in person)

And things just got better and better

We were happy to leave good old Jim in town.

After around 4 hours , for a distance that felt like 5 kilometers, we arrived at our little jungle lodge.

Had a 30 minute , well needed, power nap,

a snack,

and joined the group of grandpa, with his daugther , her daugther and their guide, to go and see what we came here for.

You wiggle your way along the river.

And of course, there is many wonders to discover in the jungle.

And then the canopy opens and you get to here.

To our delight, we went further in and around,

and behind it!

When you get out on the other side, you get to explore more form further below.

The life force of this place is incredible. It seemed the trees here were growing out of the rocks.

Obviously lots of back tracking was required.

And here we saw what we originally came for, the fabled alge. But more about it in the next post.

When we got back a couple of hours later , i snuck away from our little hut to get some very forbidden but very necessary shots with the drone.

I also got some videos but they are too large to load up here.

Very early night, very happy campers.