We had breakfast this morning at our hostel then headed off to the bus terminal to catch a bus to San Cipriano, a small town in the middle of the rainforest near the Pacific coast of Colombia. Our bus dropped us off at the highway junction of Cordoba, and we walked downhill to catch the vehicle that would take us on the next leg of our trip, called “La Brujita” (the little witch).

To explain, there were some leftover train tracks that were no longer being used, so the locals worked out another way to use the tracks. They hooked up a motorcycle to some carts that track along the rails, and that is how they get from San Cipriano to Cordoba and vice versa. It was quite an exhilarating ride!

Upon our arrival, we found a hotel to stay in for the night, dropped our things off, and headed out towards the river. We rented some tubes and walked up to the last entrance point to do some floating. It was a relatively relaxing trip with some intermittent periods of rapids. We saw a whole flock of toucans! Unfortunately, the weather didn’t completely cooperate- there was a little bit of rain, but it was ok.

When we were done floating, we headed to a restaurant for Alejandro to try the local specialty, muchillá, which Cassie had read was a freshwater shrimp. Alejandro got an order of muchillá encocado, and Cassie got some fish with a fish sancocho (type of soup). The muchillá came out and looked a lot like crawfish. Alejandro was in heaven!

After lunch, we stopped by one of the shops to try out some liquers typical of the coast- tomaseca (a spicy aguardiente), crema de viche (like Bailey’s), and arrechon (also a cream liqour, but with peanut, cloves, and other spices. We settled on a crema de viche and arrechon, and sipped on one of them and read for the rest of the afternoon until dinner time.

We had a fish plate again for dinner, read some more, then went to bed early.