It’s not every day that someone asks you to jump off a bridge. You’d think I might take it as an insult, but actually it seemed like a pretty good idea at the time. I was in Tena, just out of La Mesa, about 60km from Bogotá, and I was spending the day hiking, abseiling, rock-hopping and swimming with a group of friends.
We were in search of a waterfall in the area and our friend Hector, who’s an outdoor education teacher in Bogotá, said he knew how to get there and that there were great places to do some abseiling along the way. Since we were keen to escape the city for the weekend, we’d packed our bags, loaded our tents into the car and off we went in search of a waterfall and a slower pace.
As we drove down a dirt road and past the only tienda we had seen for kilometres, we came to a bridge. The waterfall is that way, Hector said pointing at the riverbed bellow. We strapped on our abseiling gear, harnesses and helmets and jumped from the bridge, lowering ourselves down onto the rocks.
Now, when people talk about taking the path less travelled, I am pretty sure this is what they meant. We weren’t on a path, we were making our own and the locals were coming out of their homes to check out what on earth we were doing.
Once all 7 of us made it down, we meandered along the creek bed, climbing the large rocks with careful footing and an adventurer’s pace.
As we climbed out of the river and through the scrub that surrounded us, the handsome cliffs of Tena closed in and shadowed us with their enormity.
Over some rocky terrain, down a hill and past a couple of cows, we found the waterfall. And it was spectacular. The sound it made as the water splashed off the surface of the rocks, the feel of it on our skin. Even though it was getting dark and cold, we jumped in fully clothed, still warm with adrenalin from abseiling.
Once the adrenaline wore off and it was too cold to swim anymore, we made our way back to that little tienda, had a beer and headed to a campsite for the night – happy that’d we’d escaped the city for the weekend.
Sarah
