Ancient Burial Grounds and Cool Statues

If you can stomach a 7 hour bumpy bus ride that makes you want to pee the entire time while your kidneys rock to a beat all their own, you will be lucky enough to see underground tombs with colorful designs, ancient statues carved out of volcanic rock and the picturesque scenery of San Augustin and Tierradentro. Within these two towns lie the essential elements for a new Indiana Jones movie or just good sightseeing.

Since I wasn't sure if I would hit both towns given the poor road conditions, I chose to go to Tierradentro first, the less touristy of the two. Throughout the hills of Tierradentro lie tombs where people buried their dead. Not a lot is known about the people and tomb raiders stole many of the artifacts. Stone steps lead down into each tomb that occasionally has colorful artwork in shades of red and black while others are just plain, but cool nonetheless.


While sightseeing the tombs, I came across a group of 20 locals from Cali who are all studying tourism. When they saw me, they immediately started taking pics as though the roles somehow reversed and I became their tourist attraction. I guess they don't see many Japanese American tourists and everyone wanted their picture with me. They were all so friendly and they once again reminded me why I love Colombia so much, the people. They wanted to make sure that I had a good impression of Colombia so that I would tell others to visit their wonderful country. So, go visit Colombia. After I left them, I hiked for some 6 hours and visited every tomb in the area.
The next day, I took the 5:30am bus, switched a couple times and eventually made my way to San Augustin to check out the mysterious volcanic rock statues. Little is known about these statues that sometimes accompanied burial sites. I think that instead of annual pumpkin carving contests, these people host volcanic rock carving contest and then just leave them lying around year after year.

To view these statues, I walked through a cool jungle where each had its own display. The rest are scattered in the hillsides and so I rode a horse to visit the rest.