Popayan/Silvia and St Augustin

I went to Popayan from Cali, and explored what was once the most important Spanish colonial city of the region. It was very nice, and well maintained. The buildings were all white, and there were many beautiful old churches around. I think the churches may get old after a while, but for now they are interesting. In the evening I met up with a Mexican girl and a guy from Barcelona. We went to a local pub, where we met three Colombian men, who were very pleased to meet us and were buying us drinks. The Colombians in general are some of the friendliest and most outgoing people I have ever met. These guys were no different. They were just happy to see us enjoy ourselves, and wanted to show us a good time in Colombia. The next day the three of us headed out to a very small town called Silvia, where the local indigenous group holds there weekly market. The market was actually quite lame, and was really just fruit vegetables and different tools. It was clearly not meant for tourists, but we had a nice enough time anyways. On the way back to Popayan we again met some locals who wanted to give us a ride. It was incredibly nice of them, and they drove us the 40 minutes back to Popayan and said goodbye. I don't think with my limited Spanish I could have arranged it, but these men were very nice and helped us out. The following day I headed to St Augustine. It is a little nothing town without even a paved road leading to it (The ride to and from was bumpy to say the least). When I first arrived I met a man who deals with tourism, who set me up with a hostel and got me signed up to go horseback riding the next day. Since I was there kind of late I didn't do too much that day, but prepared myself to tour the next via the horses. When I did get up the next morning and go horseback riding to see all of the different archeological ruins around the periphery of the city I quickly remembered why I don't go riding often. It HURTS! I know it is only because I don't know to ride, but I don't and it is painful to ride. The sites were cool. I thought that the ancient headstones of the important people were interesting, and it is cool to see what the society was like before the christians. I then headed to the archeological park, which was just a collection of a few dozen of these headstones/statues placed in a singles location for tourists to see. There were almost no other tourists there, but I think it is just the slow season, because they had the facilities to deal with quite a few people at once. Again, it was very cool, and good to see pre-Columbian society, but after a few the statues all start to look the same and I was done. I walked back to my hostel, had a meal and just sort of read the rest of the evening. As I headed back towards Cali to spend one last weekend with Adam I was reminded what most of the travel on this trip will be. It was an over crowded bus with no air conditioning going over a dirt road, and taking unusually long stops along the way. The ride, which was really quite close took me close to 12 hours because of all of this, but eventually I ended up back at Adam's apartment.