{"id":802,"date":"2023-04-07T00:24:39","date_gmt":"2023-04-07T00:24:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.comeup.ch\/?p=802"},"modified":"2024-01-14T21:16:46","modified_gmt":"2024-01-14T21:16:46","slug":"pulling-the-bus-out-of-the-mud","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.comeup.ch\/pulling-the-bus-out-of-the-mud\/","title":{"rendered":"Pulling the Bus out of the Mud"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I’m typing this post from Santa Elena which is located in the paragliding paradise Cauca Valley. I want to take you back about a month, though, and share more about our time in Jard\u00edn. As mentioned in our last post<\/a>, we’ve spent about a week there (our longest stay till that point) and used the chance to invest in our Spanish skills. So far we have been mainly practicing with language learning apps, namely Pimsleur<\/a> and Duolingo<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A small language school in town organized a teacher for us on short notice. That’s how we met Wilmar, just two days after settling in Jard\u00edn. From the start, it was a very casual atmosphere. We worked through a grammar book together, conversed, and memorized the vocabulary we needed to talk to the Colombian paragliding pilots, e.g. regarding the weather conditions. While it was quite an intense schedule with paragliding during the day and 2 hours of course in the afternoon, we were happy about the opportunity. And we were lucky to find such a nice teacher.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fortunately, we were also able continue the class after Katy hurt her ankle<\/a>. On the first day, Wilmar came to our accommodation. Afterwards, we went by TukTuk (little three-wheeled motor cycles with a sitting cabin) to meet Wilmar in different caf\u00e9s. This way Katy could also leave the flat for a while. At that time we stayed in an apartment with three rooms for rent, a kitchen and private bathroom. Luckily we were the only guests and therefore had the whole flat for ourselves for just 13$ a day. We made heavy use of the kitchen and cooked all meals ourselves for the first time during out trip. We had lots of fresh fruits, salads, pancakes and some cook-banana variations like R\u00f6sti (we bought the wrong kind of bananas by accident).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On our last day of the spanish course, we went to a billiard club together to play some rounds and drink beer together. It was a lot of fun and we were able to give something back by teaching some English phrases and explaining to him how we play billiard in Germany. Initially, he thought we wanted to make a fool of him and gain an advantage (which we dearly needed when competing with him). But we all got into it and enjoyed the evening. In the end, he invited us to stay with him when getting to Jard\u00edn again at some point. We were very happy to have found a friend in Colombia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And we needed to rely on this friendship earlier than we had hoped. We lost one of our radios when walking home from the landing site on one of our first days in Jard\u00edn. Every day we now asked around at the paragliding shop if the radio was found. Very early we got the information that someone<\/em> found it. But no one knew who did and where it is. But they wanted to make sure to get it to us in the afternoon. The days passed by, always with a slight variation of the same story usually by a new person.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The day before leaving we asked Wilmar to call them and ask what was going on. The story revolved around a “druggie” that found the radio and wanted to sell it, now wants a finder’s reward of the equivalent of $10 but is hard to find. The tandem pilot that Wilmar got on the phone promised to walk around town to find the guy and retrieve our radio. When entering our bus to leave Jard\u00edn the next morning we still haven’t heard back. Shortly after the bus head off I receive his message that he got the radio and is now at the bus station. He even sent me a photo of the radio with the bus station in the background. We just missed him :\/ <\/p>\n\n\n\n

We involved Wilmar again who organized a handover with the guy. He also picked up my camel bag that I, to top it off, forgot at our accommodation. Now we thought, easy, he can just send it to our next accomodation in Roldanillo. That’s until he informed us that there is no post office in Jard\u00edn. He might be in Medell\u00edn but that’s dependent on a message from a government office, which even in Germany would be a worrying prerequisite. We thought back and forth what we could do but traveling back to Jard\u00edn didn’t seem enticing at all after our experience with the bus route.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the end Wilmar found a way to send the package to us via Interrapidisimo<\/a> (the Colombian DHL). Even Wilmar said that this was a very Colombian story with someone knowing something but nothing is really happening. In the end we got our stuff back and are endlessly thankful to Wilmar who invested a lot of time to make it happen \ud83d\ude4f<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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