Colombia SA
Travel
Above the Clouds in a Secret Colombia
By MATTHEW FISHBANE | The New York Times
As crampons crunched ice, our guide, Rubará, raised his traditional woven sisal-thread handbag by his face and asked me to snap a photo. We were climbing above 17,000 feet, just shy of the summit of the Ritacuba Blanco, a glaciated peak shaped like a soft-serve ice cream cone, at El Cocuy National Park in Colombia. Aquamarine-hued icicles hung from the maw of a crevasse and, far below, clouds blanketed the Orinoco Basin.
The landscape stretched across dozens of ice-capped peaks and deep cirque valleys. Moraine lakes, formed by the natural erosion from glaciers' unhurried flow and retreat, shimmered in mineral hues. Nearly 30 miles away, we could just make out the telltale church spire of the town of Soatá. Save for a photographer friend and one other guide on the ice field, no other people were in view. The February day was bright. I’d finally caught my breath.
"The snow is sacred to us," said Rubará, the only indigenous U'Wa ranger of the eight who work in the park (he used only his single U'Wa name), before acknowledging that, as a guide, he'd never been this high before. "We should be heading down."
Down was the only way to go, but I wanted to linger. Solitude at high altitudes is increasingly rare. Unlike congested climbing destinations like Kilimanjaro and Aconcagua, Cocuy, both remote and, until recently, risky to visit, has been South America's undiscovered gem of mountaineering.
This may be a temporary condition. The park has also had a marked increase in visitors. Fabio Muñóz, the park's director, said it registered nearly as many tourists in January as in all 2008. But for now, at least, there are no 200-tent shanties there. No trail quotas, lottery peak permits or trashed base camps. Roberto Ariano, a ranger for the park, who focuses his efforts on conservation, called Cocuy a "lost corner of Colombia." >>> Go to Full Story >>>
A Story of Discovery Residents of the Americas’ oldest city happy to share their history, hospitality
By MELINA I. DE ROSE / South Florida Sun-Sentinel
There’s something about firsts. And Santo Domingo, the oldest city of the Americas, boasts many.
In the Dominican capital for the first time, I sat in the courtyard of an apartment complex, listening as the neighbors relayed a long list of must-sees: among them, the first street, military fortress and cathedral of the New World. Lucky for me, my friend (and Dominican native) Alex knew where to go and what to do. We had only a long weekend and had been en route to the car when his neighbors’ chatter led us to peek in for a quick hello. Thanks to Columbus & Co., every step here tells a story – tales my new friends were only too happy to share. Their pride was palpable. After all, whether you’re North, Central or South American, this is where it began for all of us. Being that I love a good story, I was hooked. We set out for the Colonial District the next morning. We began, appropriately, on the city’s first roadway, Calle Las Damas, or Ladies Street. It was so named, the story goes, because the wife of Diego Columbus (Christopher’s son) liked to take afternoon walks there with her ladies-in-waiting. During our stroll, I took in the stone buildings with long, wooden doors, the old-fashioned light poles and the ceramic street signs with bright-blue trim. A pair of horse-drawn buggies completed the picture... >>>>Go to Full Story >>>
