Easter

Easter Sunday 😍😍😍 I forced the kids to take a photo with me.  Not a very easy task, I tell you. 

There was a weird storm that day and the sky went all yellow.  Yep, like the Coldplay song. 😉

They opened Easter presents and got a little bit of candy--I think.  I don't really remember honestly.  But Jubal got this hat.

Aww, Wyatt's Easter photo is so cute!!!  Ana is such a good photographer!

Photos to see how tall Sebastian was getting.

A kid must have grabbed my phone.

Sebas got this hoodie, and that was a success because he's hardly taken it off in the year since.

Elena and Isabel both got traditional Colombian mochilas.

Nicolas got this hat. 

Efraim got a jersey and shorts. 

And another shirt too because he'd grown out of a lot of the clothes I had brought to Colombia.

 And just to end, another ADORABLE photo of Wyatt!!

Chingaza Parque Nacional

There's SOOOOOO many photos in this post, and I thought of separating it out into more than one post.  But I was lazy.  Have fun scrolling forever.  

This was one of my favorite places we went while in Colombia. It's just so different and stark--gorgeous!

And all the plants were so different.  

Getting fresh water from the lake. The guide insisted we could just drink it, but we still filtered it.  🙃

Everyone was so photogenic that day, so of course I had to post all these photos.  Look how pretty Isabel is!

Chingaza National Park is super fascinating because it's a páramo, a "neotropical high mountain biome" (considered a type of moor land) that's a biodiversity hotspot with lots of endemic species (kind of like cloud forests), and one of the last places where Andino bears live. We LOVED it! The frailejones soak in water out of the clouds and are a "water factory" providing drinking water to the major cities of Colombia. The whole place was super marshy and the plants were just so different than anything I've ever seen before. Super cool.

😍😍😍

Our guide told us that on a clear day you could see a volcano.  But I forgot the volcano's name.

To go into Chingaza National Park, you have to take a guide.  We hired this guide and man could he out hike us in his gum boots.  However, I think we had more endurance in the long run, he looked pretty tired by the end, I mean he was only 75.  😉.We definitely gained a thousand feet elevation in only about ¾ of a mile, it was brutal.  I wish we could have spent more time hiking.  I felt we ended really early in the afternoon. Guides are required because Colombia's water supply is largely from the páramos, so they're very careful in protecting the environment there. No apple cores on the ground, that sort of a thing.

There's lots of documentaries about the páramos, and I definitely recommend watching one, but here's just a video promoting water conservation that I liked for the videography (in Spanish, lo siento). 

Here's the link.

This was on the walk up to the park. The van couldn't make it all the way up because, well look at the road. 

It was a STEEP incline.  Colombians apparently, don't believe in switchbacks.

You could press on any of the plants and they'd be filled with water.

STEEP!

Awww! Gorgeous view and gorgeous people.

This is Lando's favorite pose.  I think Nicolas would have made a good Romantic era poet or something. 

And Jubal doing the same pose. 

We hiked around the Siecha Lakes, a group of three glacier lakes.

In the colonial period, the lakes were partly drained to extract the golden artefacts of the Muisca from the water. In 1855 a golden raft was found in one of the lakes, similar to the famous Muisca raft. It was named Balsa de Siecha or "Siecha raft" and pictured in the book El Dorado by Muisca scholar Liborio Zerda in 1883. The discovery of the raft made Zerda believe that the site of the initiation ritual of the new zipa was not in Lake Guatavita, yet in the Siecha Lakes.^[5] Later, the raft was more-or-less legally taken from Colombia to Europe. The transporting ship burnt in the harbour of Bremen and the raft was lost. (According to Wikipedia).

It's kind of wild to see lakes at different elevations.

I swear this looked like a spectacled bear, but I really couldn't zoom in farther than this.  Our guide said he saw a spectacled bear in the area the day before with a cub.  

So what do you say, is it a spectacled bear and cub?  

Here's a bear for reference.  Okay, so Sebas and I just in depth discussed these photos and decided that yes, it was bears, and now Sebastian is so disappointed in me that I didn't point them out to everyone else. 😔😔😔

All the different stones represented different towns and lakes that were connected to the Muisca religion and were in some way connected to the stars as well. 

Unfortunately, I couldn't catch much and Leo was translating like 3 words for every 100 the guide said.  

Frailejones are well known for contributing to the world in water sustainability by capturing water vapor from passing clouds in its spongy trunk and releasing it through the roots into the soil,^[2] thus helping to create vast high-altitude subterranean water deposits and lakes that will eventually form rivers. (Thanks, wikipedia).

The frailejones grow only one inch a year, so the ones were standing by are about 500 yrs old.  Sebas, of course, licked one. 

The animals found in Chingaza include the spectacled bear, deer, tapirs, pumas, Andean condors, cock-of-the-rocks, jaguars, turkeys, woolly monkeys, nocturnal monkeys, ocelots, and toucans. The large number of endemic species makes the Eastern Ranges one of the most important geographic regions for wildlife in Colombia.^[2]

It is estimated that the total flora of the park may exceed 2,000 species. There are eight species of peat moss, which can absorb up to 40 times their weight in water.^{[4]. (Also all according to Wikipedia).} 

We also saw these wild guinea pigs.  

Our guide was in a documentary about Chingaza.  Here it is for your viewing pleasure.

Really cool abandoned monastery we passed by on the way home.

We stopped on the highway to take a photo of Bogotá.  It's quite the popular look out. 

Okay, a few more park photos that I couldn't help but tack on.