Popayan, The City of White

Popayan is known as the city of white because of its large colonial old town where stark white, mostly ambiguous old buildings line the streets. As a result, walking through Popayan is beautiful but disorienting, and even after several days there we struggled to find places we had already been multiple times. We checked into the HostelTrail, the city's only hostel and the headquarters for our favorite online hostel directory, hosteltrail.com. We quickly became friends with the owners, Tony and Kim, a couple from Scotland. Tony told me that he had been considering switching his site over to a database-driven system and I offered some suggestions, leading to us arrange a free stay in exchange for my help in designing a customized content management system for the site, a really cool project to get to take part in.

Besides working with Tony on the site, we explored the old city a lot and went out at night, making friends with the locals, our favorite pastime. We also had some business to attend to in Popayan, to get our Colombian visas extended beyond the originally-issued 60 days. This can only be accomplished in certain cities that have immigration offices, and it was a somewhat painful process that took three days to finish. The first day we went into the office, a sleepy but friendly guy got our paperwork started and gave us a checklist of things to do in order to get the extension (in Spanish, of course). First, we had to go make a deposit for around $35 into a government account at a particular bank in the old city. Then, we had to go to a photo shop and get some passport-size photos taken. We got all of that done the same afternoon and went back into the office the next day, planning to get it finished up and be on our way. That day though, we went in, turned in our homework, filled out some more forms, and got two complete sets of finger and hand prints taken, only to be told that we could come in the following afternoon to finally get our extension stamps. Thankfully we did on our third visit. A lot of red tape, but worth it for a couple extra weeks to finish our exploration of southern Colombia.

The following Monday we took a three day trip out to the archaeological sites at San Agustin and Tierradentro before coming back to Popayan to wrap up the project with Tony, sell my broken laptop ($50, what a deal), and hang out on the town for one last weekend before leaving Colombia for Ecuador.

* Note: Russ broke his camera in Salento, so we didn´t get any of our own pics of Popayan!