San Gil

The next stop on the tour was San Gil, Adventure Capital of Colombia. Here you can go paragliding, caving, canyoning, bungee jumping, white water rafting etc. 

We took an over night bus to San Gil, which meant we got to wake up to this amazing view:

The first adventure we undertook was Canyoning in Pescadarito. This involved scaling rocks, practicing our diving (I'll admit the boys were a bit better at it than me) and snacking on Milo biscuits.

Alex found a natural water slide

Turns out Colombians love Milo, it's everywhere in all different forms. 

James showing us how to swan dive

I don't so much dive as I run off cliffs

Luc loving a bit of climbing action

The next big adventure was whitewater rafting down the Rio Suarez. A quote from the Lonely Planet: "Thrilling Rio Suarez is a world-class run that even experienced rafters say still scares them".  After reading that I was like "Hell no, I'm not doing that" and then I forgot and decided to do it anyway. It was crazy fun and I'm really glad we did it. After the whole raft flipping on a Class 5 rapid causing everyone to ping-pong between rocks and me falling out by myself on another rapid and having the water rip my helmet off the damage was as follows: multiple bruises, one cut, one lost earring and one lost thong. I'd say that's a pretty good damage report. 

The Delfin Solo team before we knew what we were getting into

This time we managed to get some better footage of the action!

After the guys left us for Medellin we hung around San Gil for two more days to relax. What we thought would be a nice walk up to the mirador (lookout) but it turned out to be dash from dangerous dogs after we took the wrong route up and ended up in somebodies backyard. I think it made us appreciate the view even more. 

San Gil

The Fence Alex had to jump over to get away from the dog. Remember how tall he is!

After the Mirador we thought we deserved a smoothie. San Gil has an awesome fresh food market where you can get delicious smoothies. And of course any normal smoothie bar would have a stash of aphrodisiacs, right?

Our last day we visited the near by village Barichara, supposedly one of the nicest villages in Colombia. We didn't get to spend much time here but we managed to have an awesome lunch (think skewered crumbed prawns for an entree) for $6 AUD and enjoyed walking around the streets.

Typical Barichara Street

From Barichara we did the popular 5km walk to the near by village of Guane. There isn't really anything to do in Guane beside visit the fossil museum, play soccer with the local kids and enjoy the slow pace. 

The Church, Guane

San Gil is in the Santander Department which is famous for eating ants. Sadly we didn't ever find any of these ants for sale. The closest we got was pretending an ant was eating Alex.

San Gil is also super hilly. It's crazy, I've never seen a town like it. This was the street leading up to our hostel that we had to walk every day. It's steeper than it looks, trust me.