Thanksgiving at Mesitas del Colegio

We spent Thanksgiving at our friend Sandy's finca in Mesitas del Colegio, about a 2 1/2 hour drive southwest of Bogotá.  The property has been in her family for years and it was once a high producing coffee plantation.  Coffee is still produced and processed here, but on a smaller scale.

An alter is being built, but the Virgin Mary hasn't shown up yet.  We improvised.

Walking up the river.

Centipede!

 Sandy and Linnea

Pictures from around the property...

Little Yellow Jobs

 The old beneficiadero (I don't know if I am spelling that right, but it's a coffee processing barn).  It has a lot if big roasters inside that they stopped using because they were powered by gasoline.  

 Inside the beneficiadero.

 In the states, we only see poinsettias in December, but in Colombia, we see them all the time.  They are full shrubs, not gangly and leggy like the ones that get planted in the ground after the holidays are over.

We had a great Thanksgiving meal of Eric's deep fried turkey, Allison's brussel sprouts and white beans, vegetarian pumpkin lasagna for the vegetarian in the group, and my sweet potato gratin, stuffing and pumpkin flan.  Being in Colombia, we had to get creative with some of the ingredients that were available to us.  We scrambled to find cream of tartar (got it from our neighbor from California who brought it back from the states), pumpkin puree (we made it from scratch and will probably never buy canned pumpkin puree again), and paid as much for the oil to fry the turkey as we did for the actual turkey.  Sorry, there are no photos of the meal.  We were too busy eating!

Parque Nacional Chicaque

Our weekend plans to go to a finca for a warm, lazy weekend by the pool fell apart on Thursday night.  On Friday, we tried to make a secondary plan, but nothing panned out.  So when we woke up on Saturday morning, we thought we would just have a Bogotá weekend, but that just didn't feel right.  So we started a quick search of places we could go that were close to the city.

That short search led us to Parque Nacional Chicaque.  A 40 minute taxi to the southern suburb of Soacha near one of the southern bus terminals took us to "la casa amarillo" where a bus would be there to take us the additional 30 minutes to the park.  We found the yellow house and the lunch spot that was next to it, so we sat for some arepas and empanadas while we waited for the bus to arrive.  Surprisingly, it was there and we were off to Chicaque.

Chicaque is a privately owned park established in 1990.  Within this small park, there are over 300 species of birds, 30 mammals and 7 different types of forests.

When we arrived, we paid our entrance fee and headed for El Refugio, our hotel.  Thankfully, we each had only a backpack for the overnight trip because we had a 45 minute hike to get to our hotel.  I guess we missed that bit of information when we looked over the website earlier that morning when making our decision to go there.

Linnea arriving at El Refugio

 Hummer

 Sunset from the deck looking toward the Magdelena Valley

 Morning view of the mountain face, Contrafuerte, from our room

 The forest trail called Bosque de Robles where we took a hike on Sunday morning.  Colombia is the only country in South America with oak trees.

The lower camping zone.  

 We decided to take a 4-wheel vehicle out of the park... 

 As we were waiting at the entrance of the park for our bus to take us back to Bogotá, we had to wait a bit, so we slipped into a restaurant for coffee and pastries.  The cloud surrounding the mountain top was so thick that the camera had a hard time focusing.