Desierto de la Tatacoa & San Agustin - Fake Deserts and Fun Statues

Desierto de la Tatacoa

I knew nothing about the Tatacoa Desert, only that I wanted to go there because the pictures looked pretty cool. Turns out it's a bit off the gringo trail, although it was packed with locals on break for Semana Santa, and isn't really a desert. It rained A LOT while we were there. It's not that much fun being in a desert while it's raining, there's not a lot you can do. We spent a lot of time hanging out in our tent reading. We stayed two nights and luckily on the second day the rain eased off enough that we got to go on a tour around the 'Grey Desert' as well as the 'Red Labyrinth'.

Cacti in the desert

This type of cactus bears one of my new favourite fruits - it looks like a pink chilli

On the inside it looks like a dragon fruit and it tastes delicious. 

It was crazy muddy walking around here

The Red Labyrinth 

It really was a beautiful part of the country

Grey Desert - not quite as striking as the red one

Someone has built a pool in the Grey Desert that is filled with a natural spring. It was quite a weird experience. There was also a man selling rum and raisin ice-cream. It was definitely a different experience to what I was expecting. 

I don't want to brag or anything but I want to note that our tours through the desert were only in Spanish and we understood about half of it! Although our guide did say he was speaking very simply because our Spanish is so bad!

San Agustin

San Agustin is an average little town but it's surrounded by amazing statues that were left behind by  pre-Hispanic peoples. There have been over 500 different statues discovered. Some have been moved around and placed in a museum but a lot of them are still out in the fields, if not in their original locations then close to them.

Our first day in San Agustin we went to the archaeological park which contains a museum and a lot of statues and burial mounds in their original positions.

The "Chocolate Mustache" on this guy indicates where he was buried up to when he was originally discovered. I think the sharp teeth make reference to Jaguars. 

This one is my favourite and has been adopted as the town's logo

This is an example of a tomb. A bit creepy. 

Our second day we had a 4 hour horse ride around the country side to see a few more archaeological sites. It's been a reaaaaaaallly long time since I've ridden a horse and possibly the first time for Alex. We both enjoyed it, even got a bit of a trot in. We were also predictably very sore the next day.

Our horses having a snack as we had a refreshing juice

This statue still has some of it's original colouring. Although a few years ago, for some reason, someone decided to repaint the whole statue, basically bright yellow. After some restoration work it's pretty much as good as old.