Guasca

We go to Guasca (pronounced Wasca) every weekend and it's AMAZING but we haven't really posted much about it so I want to fix that! Guasca is about an hour and 15 minutes outside of Bogota and it is definitely in the country!! Juana and Manolo have a studio there and a bit of land- a small finca, if you will. They don't have beds there so they don't stay overnight but they would like to add on to the studio and perhaps retire there. The studio itself is tiny, no electricity, and limited running water but its a complete haven! It has a fire place and lots of Manolo's art so you couldn't ask for much more. Its especially a treat when you're in there in front of the fire listening to a rain/thunderstorm, which is pretty much a guartentee. This weekend we went for a walk up the road that the studio is off of- incredible, everything is so colorful. We can hardly imagine what the warm climate plant and animal life is going to be like! We also took a short cut through the forest to get to the road, which was pretty thick with vegetation so it made for some pretty cool pictures- now you know what a cold weather Andean forest looks like!

It has been raining a lot here recently and there has been a lot of road flooding but on the way back this weekend we drove through a town, La Calera, that was completely flooded! The water was rushing down the hill side, literally like a river, straight into the homes that we built in the valley-terrible. There were also streams of water pouring off the cliffs that the road is cut out of (remember we are in the mountains) and it looked like waterfalls 3 feet from the road. The roads were ok though- only about 6 inches of water to drive through, which isn't "too bad" here so we made it home fine but WOW! The flooding was definitely a reminder that we are in the third world- its pretty crazy to see water rushing into little more than shacks and watch people try to save their homes with a broom.