I feel like I haven't written anything (worth reading) in this in a loooong time. Partly I was traveling in Peru and it was difficult/I had way better things to do. But also a lot of it is that I've been feeling really at home here in Colombia recently, and so I forget that I'm still traveling.

Two weeks ago I went to Pance, which is a town on the outskirts of Cali which a river clean enough to swim in. There are like 4 or 5 rivers in Cali but all of the other ones are too polluted to enjoy. From Pance you can access a national park with beautiful jungle and mountains. And the best part is that it costs only about $5 to get there and back, which is CLUTCH because I'm pretty much broke at this point.

I went with two Colombian friends, one of whom, Sebastian, used to work in the national park and so he knew all the guards and all the trails. We met up with Sebastian, the skinniest person I've ever seen, eating a bag of chips he had stolen on his way over, in a mall in southern Cali. From there we took the most crowded bus I've ever ridden on. I literally did not have to hold on as we swerved through the mountains because there were people holding me up on all sides. And, there were two seriously grumpy old women sitting in the front row of seats yelling at everyone to pack in a little tighter so that we could fit more people on the bus. I figured that because they were being so obviously rude, I was justified in unsubtley giving them some glares.

Once we got there we walked for a bit up to the beautiful river where we found a private waterfall and had lunch. I'm not even going to try to describe how beautiful the jungle is, because I won't even come close, but it is incredible to be in a place where everything is so alive. We swam in the river, climbed up the water falls, slid down on the rocks which formed natural water slides, incredible.

Then we decided to hike a bit more, but rather than pay the entrance fee to the park, Sebastian knew how to sneak in, so we did a little jungle trail blazing and bypassed the entrance. However, while we were hacking through the vines, without even knowing about my phobia, Sebastian goes 'oh, seriously, be very careful when you move the foliage. there are a lot of TREE SNAKES here and they are very poisonous' (!!!!). So obviously I couldn't really enjoy the offtrailing because I was freaking out a lot inside, but luckily we did not see any snakes. Just the most beautiful, huge blue butterflies, plus like 20 other kinds of butterflies, and some incredible birds whose name I can't remember but they are about as colorful and awesome looking as parrots. (Btw there are also parrots here. It's really crazy how many awesome animals there are here that people in the U.S. only read about.)