Visiting Suesca was an adventurous day. We hiked for an hour and a half. Caved for an hour and a half. And hiked back for an hour and a half.
I can say with confidence that this was the most exciting track event I've been on so far on Remote Year. If you're ever in Bogota, I highly recommend making your way out to Suesca!
Right from the start inside the caves, we had to hoist ourselves over a round rock, and some of us fell into some pretty deep water. There were some bouldering challenges, all over more deep water. One person dropped their headlamp into some water, and we watched it sink...and sink some more...and keep sinking until it finally hit the bottom under a lot of murky water. I'm translating through the metric system and Spanish, but I think our guide said it was the equivalent to 15 feet!
At one point, I did the splits around a corner and was only holding onto a very slim edge. Another time, our guide pointed to a place where I should put my foot, and I just said, "no...." and did it my own way. Toward the end, we had the choice of walking through freezing water, or shimmying through a crawlspace. Even with my arachnophobia and having had seen some spiders directly above my head in one of the larger rooms, I choose to crawl through the crawlspace because I had not yet gotten wet, and valued my dry clothing. Fortunately, I made it through the whole way and managed to stay dry, but when my friend Ellen Zha made it through the crawl space, and was faced with a final boulder along a ledge, she fell into the water. She didn't bring any extra clothes, and she was able to use my extra pair of dry bottoms for the hike back to town.
Here are some pictures of the day, most of which were taken by Chuck Thomas, a fellow Meraki Remote.
This last picture goes into my Tiny Globe album. My former coworkers at the EPA gave this to me as a departure gift and asked me to take photos with it all around the world.
#Colombia #RemoteYear #RemoteYearMeraki #Meraki #Suesca #SuescaColombia #Caving #Bogota #RemoteYeartracks #RockClimbing #Caves
