A weekend of camping
Due to Monday June 6 being a public holiday here in Colombia, and due to my host AIESEC LC having a lot of new members who hadn?t really got to know each other in a social setting yet, the LC decided to go on a camping trip for two days over last Sunday and Monday. So myself, one Brazilian and 18 Colombians embarked for 2 cold, wet, and thoroughly outstanding days at Neusa, around 90 minutes away from Bogot�.
Camping, for anyone who?s been already knows, is much more enjoyable when things aren?t always smooth smiling. If you wanted an easy comfortable weekend you should just stay home. And in that sense, this trip was truly excellent. It began in typical Colombian fashion with us departing in 4 cars from our scheduled meeting point in Bogot� two hours after the scheduled meeting time. One the way we passed this very random theme-park type complex, that has giant replicas of the Taj Mahal and a dozen other oversized buildings, just sitting there in the middle of nowhere and completely devoid of people. The logic of this eluded me at the time, and still does.
Once we were in the park grounds and very almost at our campsite, a tree branch that we ran over decided it wanted some revenge, and slashed one of the rear tyres of the car I was in. After emptying the boot of camping gear and adapting to the commencing rain, we changed this tyre with the spare, only to discover upon letting the jack down that the spare was flat. So someone went off with the spare to find a pump while I sat down on the road with a beer and started playing chess.
What followed was 2 days and one night of cold weather, on and off rain, wet socks, wet shoes, cheap food, 20 people trying to sleep in two tents, many fun and games with cool AIESECers from the LC, the occasional sporting injury from said games, and plenty of beer. Oh, and the entire grass campsite area was a minefield of horse-pats.
And then finally, in the car on our way out of the camp site, another group of people flag us down and us ask to help jumpstart their car, as their battery had died. So we willingly obliged and headed down the muddy access road to get from the main road where we were to the grass area where they were. We got their car started, but then whilst trying to get back up the access road, we got bogged. Or, to be more correct, we got bogged if we tried to go up, but could quite easily just role back down (so we weren?t stuck, just trapped). And so I went about thinking for another solution. We went driving along the grass by the side of the lake to see if there was another access road connected to this bit of grass somewhere. One was found. So far so good. We started to drive up it. Also good. But then, with the main road in site, we discovered this access road was entirely blocked by cut down tree branches (and quite a lot of them). And with this the final teamwork activity of the weekend could begin. A dozen AIESECers and 20 minutes of working in the rain later, plus one more jump start (this time to us), plus helping to push two more cars up this access road, and we were on our way back to Bogot�.
The way camping should be. Like I said, I had an absolute ball :)
I?ll post some pics if I get copies of them from other people.
Camping, for anyone who?s been already knows, is much more enjoyable when things aren?t always smooth smiling. If you wanted an easy comfortable weekend you should just stay home. And in that sense, this trip was truly excellent. It began in typical Colombian fashion with us departing in 4 cars from our scheduled meeting point in Bogot� two hours after the scheduled meeting time. One the way we passed this very random theme-park type complex, that has giant replicas of the Taj Mahal and a dozen other oversized buildings, just sitting there in the middle of nowhere and completely devoid of people. The logic of this eluded me at the time, and still does.
Once we were in the park grounds and very almost at our campsite, a tree branch that we ran over decided it wanted some revenge, and slashed one of the rear tyres of the car I was in. After emptying the boot of camping gear and adapting to the commencing rain, we changed this tyre with the spare, only to discover upon letting the jack down that the spare was flat. So someone went off with the spare to find a pump while I sat down on the road with a beer and started playing chess.
What followed was 2 days and one night of cold weather, on and off rain, wet socks, wet shoes, cheap food, 20 people trying to sleep in two tents, many fun and games with cool AIESECers from the LC, the occasional sporting injury from said games, and plenty of beer. Oh, and the entire grass campsite area was a minefield of horse-pats.
And then finally, in the car on our way out of the camp site, another group of people flag us down and us ask to help jumpstart their car, as their battery had died. So we willingly obliged and headed down the muddy access road to get from the main road where we were to the grass area where they were. We got their car started, but then whilst trying to get back up the access road, we got bogged. Or, to be more correct, we got bogged if we tried to go up, but could quite easily just role back down (so we weren?t stuck, just trapped). And so I went about thinking for another solution. We went driving along the grass by the side of the lake to see if there was another access road connected to this bit of grass somewhere. One was found. So far so good. We started to drive up it. Also good. But then, with the main road in site, we discovered this access road was entirely blocked by cut down tree branches (and quite a lot of them). And with this the final teamwork activity of the weekend could begin. A dozen AIESECers and 20 minutes of working in the rain later, plus one more jump start (this time to us), plus helping to push two more cars up this access road, and we were on our way back to Bogot�.
The way camping should be. Like I said, I had an absolute ball :)
I?ll post some pics if I get copies of them from other people.
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