After lunch we took a cab to La Catedral, formerly prison of Pablo Escobar (built to his specifications and so equipped with tunnels and various luxuries) and now an old-age home run by monks. The road climbed high in the hills behind Envigado, and it was startlying how suddenly we left the city behind: a single turn of the narrow winding road and it was gone and all around was forest: first dense sub-tropical and then cool pines. Along the way we passed a caballero whose horse was out of his control and he looked most undignified, holding on to his hat, his mount and himself at the same time. Our driver laughed and laughed, and made an excellent gesture that I would love to adopt but fear I will rarely have the opportunity: a hard, sharp smack of the back of the hand into the palm of the other. He also thought it hilarious that we were planning to walk, not least because we had been passing a series of signs on the local wildlife, many of whom seemed rather more vicious in appearance than one might expect so close to the city.
He dropped us off at the Catedral where our way was to start. We tried not to gawk at the former prison itself, partly because it had been largely demolished and replaced anyway, and partly because of a large, particularly peevish sign (understandably so, under the circumstances). On the path down to our walk, though, there were some old watch towers, one with a pants-less mannequin, that it was hard not to stare at.
The path was very pleasant, down the side of a hill through fresh piney forests and over noisy little streams tumbling down the hillside. The first was marked with a white madonna, very pretty indeed. There were a good number of people on the way, families and couples enjoying themselves, and the occasional whiff of herbal pleasures. The path soon because quite precarious, and the ropes running from uncomfortably slender sapling to uncomfortably slender sapling were much needed. I, being short, of course scrambled quite a bit, nearly flat on my stomach at some points to reach the next foothold. To one side a gravelly, unstable precipice. Then the rope itself disappeared and the path disappeared down what looked like nothing so much as a cliff edge which reminded me of the dragon’s back in KL but without the comfort of the occasional well-placed foot or handhold. This was really quite a terrifying descent, not least because the rocks were wet and slippery from yesterday’s rain, and many were in flat planes with no obvious toe holds. At one point, when the only obvious footholds were further away than I could reach the precipice was really very close, and the only tree root I had as a handhold was thin and unreliable, I found my legs shaking in a sort of panic. Nonsense, I admonished myself, because I was not panicking in my mind, but my body clearly disagreed. So I had to wait for a few seconds to calm it down and then, happily, found a place to brace a foot and make my way down.
This took us to the foot of a waterfall, a very beautiful one falling down a notch in the hillside into a clear, clean pool. There were a couple of others there, as well as a dog and I can’t imagine how the creature got down, or indeed back up.
The path was supposed to continue from the waterfall, but this, I’m afraid, is where I tapped out. My walking directions said to continue along the stream and, well, at this point and for a hundred or more feet below, the stream was a waterfall. Not only that, the only apparent way to descend was by following a knotted rope which disappeared through a narrow crack between boulders and down over the waterfall in such a way that we would not have been able to set our feet down at least for fifty of those feet. So, we decided to retrace our steps; it had been a good walk already, and a rewarding one.
(Later I thought that maybe the path had continued further back, where there was something that could be crossroads with one arm leading to the stream, but oh well).
Anyhow, we clambered back up – far easier going uphill than down, though I did hit my head on a sharp rock just as I was saying to the GF that one of the interesting things about this sort of walk is how aware one is of all of one’s body and its relation to the environment, not just one’s feet. The next question was how to get back – the end of the planned walk was near a bus stop, but at La Catedral there seemed to be no bus or taxi stand. Fortunately we spotted a couple who had been at the waterfall and had nice faces, and decided to follow them and ask for a lift.
We fell back a little (or, accurately, I fell back, being pitiful) and by the time we arrived at La Catedral they seemed to have disappeared. We found a woman manning a small khokha and I, with delightful success, asked her about taxis. She bellowed to another woman further up the hillside, who bellowed back, and the two of them pulled out their mobile phones as reception was clearly supremely unreliable.
In the meantime, an English speaking tour guide with a group of North Americans appeared making loud jokes about ‘Jesus with a machine gun’ – clearly the sort of outfit that the monks were warning against. The group had a small van that they did not fill up and though the thought of asking that repellent lot made us cringe, we sidled towards them. Just as we approached the guide, though, the woman bellowed at us – she’d got through to the taxi driver. The van drove away the taxi driver said no, he was busy.
Nothing for it, so we started walking down the road, having estimated it would take about 2 hours of walking to reach the point at which we’d seen taxis. It was a pleasant way down but then, happily, a taxi passed and I think for the first time on such an excursion (as we walked along a road, tired and hoping for a taxi to whisk us away) it was empty. It stopped, we got in and drove off to the coffee shop in Laureles and passed along the way the couple we had shadowed, hailing our taxi hopefully and then continuing on their way. (In retrospect, perhaps we should have stopped for them but I doubt they felt the same being unaware that we had marked them out as potential lift offerers).
All in all, despite its failures, it was a lovely day and a beautiful walk, and the clambering is indeed something I enjoy. Fear of death adds a certain something to an afternoon stroll.