Looking over the guides I concluded that Cali is OK, but not
really a tourist destination. Cool are the bars where salsa is danced since
Cali claims to be the birthplace of salsa. However, visiting one would imply
staying up after 8 pm, which is a major challenge for me. We will see how I
feel at the end of the day.
For the day I decided to go walk in the Parque Natural Nacional Los Farallones de Cali, which is a rather
large park that covers a large patch from the Rio Cueca, to the crest of the
Cordillera Occidental, and down the west slope almost to the coastal plain.
Unfortunately the access to the park is amongst the best guarded secrets among
the Caleňos, and nobody could give me precise instructions. I ended going to
the main office of the National Park Service, and even there the best I got
were verbal instructions.
I was doing good progress when a policeman flagged me to the
side. He was very polite, but informed me that since my license plate ended in
the number 1 I was not supposed to circulate on Mondays 8 to 10 am, and 4 to 8
pm. We went through the whole story of me being a visitor and the car being a
rental, and how in Bogotá nobody had told me a thing. He was very sympathetic,
but left the final decision to the traffic agent, with which I had to repeat
the whole performance. He told me there was a fine involved and that the car
had to be impounded, but I kept a peaceful demeanor, with big, innocent eyes,
and eh finally relented, allowing me to park on the spot for one and a half
hours, until the 10 am curfew expired. I tell you, everyone loves Mexicans 😊
It took me forever to reach the park, including a good 10 km
of a miserable dirt road, but I finally found the place, and had the privilege
of walking along the Rio Pance, which is a crystalline mountain stream
entrenched in a deep valley cut on the shoulders of the Cordillera Occidental.
The river is a great favorite among the Caleňos, who come here in droves to
swim in the pools.
The mountains all around me are magnificent, rising steeply
hundreds of meters. I was hoping to get great exposures of folded sedimentary
rocks, but instead found heavily vegetated slopes where no rocks were cropping
out. Along the path I stepped on massive, black, heavy rocks polished by the
boots of generations of hikers. I finally used a smaller rock to chip a bigger
one, and conclude that I was looking at amphibolites, which would represent the
forearc metamorphic belt (found at depth between the arc and the
fold-and-thrust belt due to the combination of high temperature from the arc,
and anisotropic stress due to gravitational spreading).
I got back down from the river at about 2 pm, and very
conscious of the 4 pm curfew I made a beeline to my hotel, parked, and went out
for an enormous dinner of blood sausage, salad, inch-thick steak, and grilled
vegetables, all for US$ 20. I was quite satisfied indeed.
P.S. I did go out at night (7 pm) to take a look at the
salsa disco bars. There was the music, there were the lights, but not a single
soul (you actually need two to salsa) in sight. But I was here, in the
birthplace of the salsa!
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