Hiking the Stone Trail of an Indigenous People

Saturday, Aug. 26, 2017--Day trip to Barichara and Guane

I pushed myself this morning--out of bed at 6:20, showed and shaved and leaving for the restaurant when it opened at 7:00.  Breakfast finished and at the bus station at 7:25 to catch the 7:30 bus to Barichara.  The reason for pushing myself was so that I could make a hike from one town on the edge of a canyon to another in the canyon down a trail used by the indigenous people of the area for hundreds of years.

Barichara is a beautiful town.  It is so perfect in its architecture that it is surprising.  The whole town consists of rows of one-story houses with tile roofs and stucco siding.  The bottom portions of the outside (maybe the lower meter or yard) and the door and window frames are painted either in blue or green mainly with a few in aqua.  The sidewalks are all redish-brown tiles.  And the streets are all red sandstone flagstones.  That's the WHOLE town that is like that except for the church which is built out of the red sandstone.  All stops are still traditional looking from the outside, and almost all are still traditional looking inside with shelves of goods around the walls and a service counter.  It all makes a perfectly picturesque town that doesn't seem to have changed since the mid-1700s when it was built.  That's why it is frequently used to film scenes for movies and TV shows that are set in the colonial period.  It's somewhat like a Colombian Santa Fe except that it is like Santa Fe was back in the 1950s before it grew and started having modernized versions of its style of architecture.

Besides wanting to see Barichara which has been called the most beautiful town in Colombia, I waned to take a hike that starts there.  This area of the country has been the home for the Guane people.  Their original capital, from before the Spanish arrived, was the community of Guane down in a canyon.  The hike is over the trail that was used by these people to leave the canyon when traveling elsewhere.  Apparently it was decided, maybe by the Spanish, to build a new town up at the edge of the canyon which became Barichara and the main city with Guane remaining like a small village.  Eventually the walking path was paved with large coble stones for the traveling between the two.  It is now a popular tourist hike (although not very popular since I only saw one couple of tourists other than myself on it).

The Barichara-Guane trail is mostly downhill from Barichara, and today there are buses that can be taken for the return trip.  Still, it is supposed to be a 2-hour hike even going downhill.  I stopped to take photos and thought I went at a normal pace, and I still finished it in less time than expected--about 1 hr. 45 min.  I was passed by one local man who had been shopping and was returning home.  And I passed a man with a herd of goats eating the grass beside the train and a woman using her machete to cut dead wood to take home for her cooking fire.  There were droppings that looked like they were from foxes and beautiful views out over the canyon and the mountains on the other side.  And there were birds that made a beautiful warbling sound with all joining in when one started.

Guane is less elegant than Barichara, but it is definitely older with a more "authentic" old age look.  If Barichara is Santa Fe of the 1950s, then Guane is Taos.  Guane has true cobble stone streets rather than flagstone ones.  Guane's homes as if they were built one-by-one rather than by the block.  There's not much to the town beyond the pretty church.  The town square was mostly dead, there were a few shops open and a few with signs but not open even on this Saturday.  It's just a quiet village.

A bus took me back to Barichara where I walked up and down the streets looking into businesses and homes, sat in the plaza, and went into the church.  It is a very pleasant and successful small town.  And a very beautiful one.

I was back in San Gil around 13:30, and I saw a restaurant with a luncheon menu that sounded good.  After stopping by my room, I went back there around 14:00.  I ordered the carne cerda (pork steak) as my main course.  My soup was the best part of the meal, as usual.  It was a bowl of pea soup made with chicken broth with chunks of potato and carrots and an occasional bean.  (It also included a whole chicken heart with the aorta sticking out of it.)  Along with the soup, she also brought a small bowl of shredded cabbage-carrot salad and a pitcher of a very nice red fruit juice.  The main plate had the thin slice of pork steak, white rice, a grainy white root (looked a lot like a luffa), and a serving of garbanzo beans in a broth that looked like they could have been from a can.  Everything was mostly tasteless on the main plate.  Some garlic and maybe some sauce made from tomatoes would have really livened that plate up.

I tried to go back out around 18:30, but it started sprinkling.  As I walked toward the main square, I saw everyone rushing to catch a bus.  That mostly ended the night life, so I bought a cake and brought it to the room to eat for dessert.