Hitchhiking through Colombian mountains and sleeping at 4000m in a tent, with rain to take a bath in the hot river of a volcano

Hanna found hot springs in a blog which are not touristic. There are plenty around here but they are more like public swimming pools and cost about 13€ entry. Just another tourist attraction - we wanted the exact opposite of that. The location of these springs was pretty difficult to find and to maintain its exclusivity, I'll not post its name or location here on the blog.

We went from Salento to Manizales, the next big city and explained there what we wanted to do. Everyone told us to just go to these public swimming pools, because tourists love these and they are also hot springs. No one understood that we wanted something 'off the beaten tracks'. We finally found out which company goes to our area and we had the same discussion again. We missed the expensive bus (10€) that would have brought us really close to our destination, so we took the next one that headed along the main street from where we wanted to walk 30km. Again they told us to go to the public swimming pools, told us we would have trouble with heavy rain, snow, the height (4000m+), the lack of infrastructure. We just said we had a tent and bought the tickets. They probably believed we were insane.

Our bags were protected from the rain, I wore a raincoat and a basecap, knowing my shoes and jeans would get wet in the rain outside.

We are at 3500m here, walking each with ~11kg backpacks.

Even though we couldn't see much, we really enjoyed the landscape. We also tried hitchhiking, there weren't many cars though.

This area was way more beautiful than this Valle in Salento. Salento really gets way too much attention but I won't come back to that topic anymore.

We had luck with hitchhiking and some locals carried us about 8km in their old US army truck, until they left into a street that wasn't even on maps.me (usually this map has even the most hidden paths).

Soon enough we had luck again and some tourists brought us to the waterfall above. He also told us stuff about the Colombian army and guerrillas in this area, which we considered bullshit since everyone else on our way told us it's perfectly safe, even for hitchhiking.

The dude was so worried about our safety that he wanted to carry us the missing 7km, even though it was the wrong direction.

7km may not sound like much but he wasn't able to drive faster than 10km/h maximum, the road conditions were terrible. He stopped after 2km since his car really couldn't continue more. He told us to be quiet at night, camp at a hidden place and not to make any light.

This was at about 17:15. Sun is up here from 6 to 6 and we had 5km missing, were also pretty exhausted. Hiking at 4000m (we gained some altitude on the way) really is no joke.

We really wanted to reach our destination (the hot wells still were a few kilometers away from there though) and continued until it got dark and found a flat spot to camp. Flat spots, that are not the road, are rare here.

We didn't really care for the tourists' fears and also didn't have much choice where to camp.

Hanna was in Israel before and made many friends there. She learned that the army there puts toilet paper on their tuna, burns it together with the oil, which heats the fish up and gives a smoky taste. We tried that but I think it was too watery, the toilet paper just wouldn't burn properly.

The ride was super bumpy but our joy about this easy lift was bigger!

The truck has been completely empty and while we were wondering what he might carry we already arrived.

You see (barely) a house on the left in the picture, that is actually a shop to buy the most necessary stuff. While we asked the owner for the way, he told us he needed to be paid to enter the hot springs, about 1,3€ per person, then he would explain to us how to get there. We paid but insisted that we would get something warm to drink when we returned. He agreed and offered to take care of our backpacks, so we could only carry the most important stuff down, good deal. Apparently we aren't the only ones around there, plenty of motorcycles were parked and the dude even had beds. If we knew that, we would have walked an hour in the dark last night but now we can say we have camped at 4000 meters in the cold rain, alone in the Andes 🤙

But enough of that, we knew how to get down to the hot springs!

There is a medium active volcano around which heats the water. That explains the smell. Don't worry about that volcano, it's super safe there. We could even climb the crater (advertised by the official touristic center with entry fee and everything) but we decided not to since it's at 5300 and there was plenty of snow that night.

So we went closer to the smelly hot springs.

The water was just a tad too hot to take a bath but we took our shoes off and walked to colder areas of the river.

The clouds left, it didn't look like rain at all anymore.

I took a video of me walking through there where I accidentally dropped my towel on accident, you'll find it here, it's hilarious:

https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=1bXwzXyKXRPeg8iqfXOLqJl1MjmzXaURI

(Sorry that there is no hyperlink, you will have to copy-paste the link, this new look of the website didn't improve much, actually it's a pain in the ass...)

We found a nice spot and started our well-deserved bath.

Some whiskey at 8 in the morning? Why not when Lenin offers it?

Turns out, they originally wanted to go up the glacier but decided due to the difficult weather conditions against it. The motorbikes at the house were from their friends who went up there.

The way up felt really long but we drank too little water before which made it more difficult. Remember the height here.. Being tipsy from the morning whiskey made it fun though.

As we made it finally to the top we asked for hot water and chatted really nice with the owner there, drank 3 thermo cans mate (I got into it and always carry some with me), shared with the owner, helped an injured gaucho (cowboy) with Ibuprofen because his lasso cut him into his hand somehow, got changed, breakfasted a second time and left this rough paradise we fell in love with.

As our legs started to get tired we heard (finally) the noises of a truck in the fog. The sight was heavily impaired, below 25 meters but there was no way to go fast there anyway.

Guess who? The same truck then the day before! They told us they would just make 2 kilometers more on our road but two kilometers is better than nothing.

They easily carried us 4 kilometers until they disappeared in the fog - onto a road that isn't on maps.me either.

We continued walking (what else should we be doing? 😂) and as we realized Sundays are shit for hitchhiking due to less work-related traffic another truck came and stopped. In these mountain areas, the people are extremely helpful and friendly!

He told us as well to get in the back of his truck and brought us back to Manizales, that was over an hour away. Luckiest driver so far!

Now we are sitting on a bus to Buenaventura where we will buy a knife (realized knives are really helpful for many things 🤣), restock our food and figure the cheapest way out to get to an area called 'El Choco'. This area is so far off the beaten track that Google maps doesn't even have the roads there. The only way to get there is by boat or plane. We hope to be able to find a cargo ship which is probably cheaper than the regular one.

I'll probably update you before we leave to the 'no man's land' - the internet connection there is probably terrible.

So far, so good. This mountain journey gave me so many great impressions already, I'm totally loving this country 🤩🤩

Love and peace,

Laurin

PS: As always, more photos in the photo section 👍