This morning, I woke up and decided to drink my coffee that I had purchased in Salento, Colombia. The coffee was bought straight from the farm, and I can vividly remember seeing the farmer package it up. I decided to finally blog on our recent trip in February to the wonderful country of Colombia. I have been putting it off just because of all the challenges that our world is facing, and honestly I didn’t think anyone would want to read about how much fun we had doing something that no one can really do at the moment. I sat and thought, may we never take our travel for granted again. It is hard to believe that just a month or so ago, we were traveling freely from country to country with not a worry in the world. Now, this virus has us confined to the borders of our homes. This pandemic will bring our lives and what we do every day into a real perspective, as hard as it may seem. I want to focus on our wonderful trip to Colombia, because it brings me peace knowing that there are these wonderful places to be seen again one day. The distance now we will make it all the better when we can see them again.
We stepped off the plane in Bogota at midnight, tired and wearied from the long international flight. It never seems to change. We are always beat and worn out from every time we fly. We always seem to arrive at either 4 AM or midnight. We never arrive at like 10 AM, where we have time to adjust for the day. We were greeted by our warm hosts, Pierre and Alejandro, who said, “alright, we have to be on another plane at 4 AM.” “We have to be back at the airport in 2 hours. Let’s go to the hotel, get some sleep for one hour, and do it all over again!” What’s the point of even sleeping? We crashed in our room, ate some food, and were back at the airport for our one hour flight to Puerto Carreno, the small fishing town on the Venezuelan border.
We went on a 10 day fishing trip to the eastern part of Colombia, and stayed with a host family at a lodge with a group of 4 other fisherman from the States. Pierre was our organizer from America, and Alejandro, the local host and guide was from Colombia. All of us were jazzed to be there, but as we got off the plane we were hit with about 95 degrees of heat. A stark contrast from Memphis, TN weather.
We stood in line at the one carrousel baggage belt. We literally could touch our bags as they got off the plane, but these people were super proud of their one belt and insisted they use it. We got through the one room greeting area, and loaded our gear onto two Landcruiser trucks for our 2 hour car ride to our lodge. The truck ride was long, windy, and one of the roughest of my life, but we were heading to fish! We got to the lodge around 3 pm, and no one wasted any time. We were greeted by the warm family who owns the lodge. They are cattle farmers, and run this lodge during the fishing season, 5 months out of the year. The husband, wife, children, grandparents, all play a part in keeping the rooms clean, food cooked, and fishing guides on call. We dropped our bags, still dead tired, and hopped on our boat with our guide, Pacho. We soared up the river and within 15 minutes were fishing for Peacock bass in the middle of nowhere on one of the prettiest and cleanest rivers in the world. The entire time we were there, we only saw one other boat. That evening, we caught about 15 fish in two hours, and knew it was going to be a good 10 days. We always fished until sunset, and my favorite part was the sundowner beer on the boat ride back to the camp when the last fish was caught. Morgan and I would put our feet up and let Pacho take us back home. There are more fishing stories to come and much more about our other 10 days in Colombia, not fishing.
Until next time,
David and Morgan
Vows To Voyage 