The Wedding
After two weeks of hard and fast travel, spending a few days in each place, doing a lot of walking and often sleeping on overnight buses, my mind felt like my journey had only just begun, but my body was telling me otherwise. Luckily, some enforced rest was on the horizon in the form of a wedding - the reason I was in Colombia in the first place.
I arrived at the wedding hotel, just outside of the city of Pereira and immediately felt out of place, my trekking clothes and big rucksack not quite matching the luxury of the palm tree lined pool and surrounding banana plantation. After a quick change in to swim shorts and a dip in the pool I started to feel more like I belonged. Other wedding guests slowly arrived, many of whom I'd met in the UK at some point, and it started to feel like a party.
A stag day was planned, and quite a wholesome one at that: quad biking. Planning in Colombia is rarely a precise art however, and due to some administrative mixups we found out on arrival that we were actually going on an adventure day of which quad biking was just a small part. We quad biked, but we also rode through a forest on the most basic train I've seen - some wooden palettes on rollers, powered by a motorbike with one wheel on the ground. The train came off the rails a few times, so we had to get off to reset it, before getting back on. At one point we encountered a woman coming the other way down the single set of tracks with produce for her shop, so we lifted her mini train to the side to allow ours to pass before replacing hers. We crossed Colombia's second biggest river in a small metal cage on rickety cables, pulled across by arm power alone. We hiked up to a waterfall with rock pools we could jump in to and swim in. Of course, expecting only quad biking none of us had brought swimwear, so we stripped off to our underwear and jumped in. It was a truly unplanned and unexpected day which really brought the group together. That night was the official opening to the wedding weekend, with two alternating live bands playing cumbia and merengue and a party in to the early hours.
I woke up feeling horrendous and was quite violently sick. At the time I thought I must have drunk too much at the party, but I was sure I hadn't. Through the week as others came down with similar symptoms, I realised it was some kind of bug that went round, and I was an early victim. I headed to the nearby hot springs (an hour and a bit drive, nearby in Colombian terms) with a group that was on their way, and enjoyed alternating between sitting in naturally hot, mineral enriched water, and standing under a cold waterfall (it seems Colombia has no shortage of waterfalls).
By the wedding itself, I was feeling a little better and could fully enjoy the beauty and emotion of the day. I felt so honoured to be present to witness such a special moment, surrounded by such a lovely group who I had bonded with over the previous days. The ceremony had everyone crying with the emotion of it all, the party was hours of food, drink, sitting, speeches, standing, talking, dancing and continuous music switching between salsa, merengue, cumbia, chacarera (from Anna's Argentinian heritage, we'd learned how to dance the night before) and English language classics, later topped off with fireworks and a late night afterparty where the many professional DJs present took turns on a set of decks set up next to the pool. A whirlwind of a day.
A day of rest and our time in the wedding hotel was over. A sad moment, but not the end of our time together as a group. We had plans.
