One of the most iconic Colombian landscapes is the Valle de Cocora...
...and its wax palms--the tallest palm trees in the world, at 70-80m.
I started out hiking with an Aussie at the hostel I was staying at who was heading in the same direction, and as the day progressed, we picked up more and more people, stopping at a hummingbird sanctuary half-way through the 6-hour hike...
...slogging on through the rain, over rivers through the cloud forest...
...and through impressive stretches of mud that made me really glad I sprang for renting galoshes from the hostel.
It was a beautiful, epic walk. And luckily not so draining that we didn't have the energy that night to take our group--by then eleven people--to a nearby bar...
...for a game of tejo. That's the reference to gunpowder. It's a Colombian game kind of like cornhole or horseshoes, where you throw stone discs at a target of clay that has a metal ring in the middle, and little packets of gunpowder are placed on the ring so that if you manage to hit on of them with your stone from a distance, it explodes. Good fun!
