Chicaque

Bogotá, Colombia

Before I left Colombia I was able to hang out with the Marias of the Hernandez household one last time. I flew in from Medellín at night and Maria-Paula insisted that I cancel my hostel and sleep in her room instead. She took the couch.

The next morning we woke up at 5am and trekked out to Chicaque National Park with her sister Maria-Jose and Maria-Jose's boyfriend.

Chicaque is a park two hours outside of Bogotá where you start atop a cliff and hike down into a valley. It's challenging hiking. So at the start there's a stretching station with a bunch of recommended stretches.

The Marias were serious about stretching. Maria-Paula was a spiritual type who liked going on yoga retreats. She was fairly anti-technology and even turned her cell phone off on weekends when she didn't need it for work. So why she liked me so much is somewhat of a mystery to me.

We spent all day hiking but didn't have time to explore the whole park, because I had to get back to Bogotá to catch a flight to Argentina.

On the bus back I talked to Maria-Paula about her future plans. She was fluent in French and wanted to move to France. But she also really liked her job in the anthropology department at the university, and she didn't want to leave it.

I told her it's better to be in a win-win situation where both options have positive outcomes than a lose-lose situation where both options suck.

Maria-Paula didn't use social media and was planning on getting a new phone # when she got to France. So the odds of us staying in touch or ever running into each other again were pretty slim. But I appreciated the time we spent together while we had it.