Cloud forest in Chicaque park and tropical forest at ProAves nature Reserve called Paujil

Daniel and I have never been to a tropical rainforest so we settled for second and third best. Some of you may already know a thing or two about tropical forests. The ones you hear about the most is the Tropical Rainforest. The Tropical Rainforest has the most rainfall compaired to any other forest. The tropical cloud forest comes in second place in terms of rain fall. Daniel and I (along with and aunt and company) traveled to a cloud forest called Chicaque last Thursday on the day of Colombia´s Indepence holiday. Chicaque is an hour´s drive outside of Bogota --especially if you leave at 7 am like we did. We did encounter lots of traffic but it wasn´t caused by cars. The traffic was created by hundreds of cyclists out for a morning ride. There were groups of cyclists with fancy gear and tight shorts just like you see in Marin County! --But unlike Marin county, there were also plenty of people with normal, inexpensive bikes attempting the same routes as the hig techcyclists. One we arrived to the park we encountered another traffic jam, but this time the jam was caused by horses. The challenging thing about Chicaques is that the trail into the cloud forest goes down, down, down the mountain side. So locals from a nearby farm walk horses down the mountain side and wait for the tired hikers to arrive thirsty and dreadful of the return hike up the mountainside. For aobut 5 dollars, you can rent a horse and head back up through the forest with a large group of other tourists. Since Daniel and I stayed up until 1 am the night before, the horse option sounded great from the very beginning of our hike. The first picture shows the beginning of or walk. As you can see by the first picture below, there is alot of "cloud" in the cloud forest. This is a picture of two FERNS (And recycle bins..)! There huge and look like palms don´t they? After walking for an hour or so through a forest full of trees with huge leaves (leaves BIGGER than the size of your head!) and a variety of fern species, we arrived at a place called The Refugio. The Refugio included a restaurant, a picnic area and a pasture for the horses (See picture below). After having a coffee break (Your darn right I drank coffee after so little sleep!) We proceeded to hike to a waterfall with the rest of our companions. Out of our group of hikers, some of us didn´t make it but Daniel and I were not among them. The water fall was small but pleasant and after a few more hours of walking we were back at the Refugio. Some of our party (like the ones who didn´t make it the waterfall for example) decided to take horses back but Daniel and I had enough coffee to hike back up the mountainside. Below is a picture of the two of us after arriving to the top of the park. The fog had lifted when we arrived and the view was amazing. I can´t help but think that a certain neice of ours would have LOVED to ride the horses in Chicaque...perhaps during her next visit to Colombia.







After visiting the cloud forest on Thursday, Daniel and I rested a day and then ventured out to the countryside to a bird reserve called Paujil reserva. Paujil is one of a group of reserves that have been recently founded by an organization called ProAves (Aves means birds in Spanish). Paujil reserve is a tropical forest which, as I alluded to above, has the third highest amount of rainfall compaired to all other forests. I think the redwood forest might be considered a tropical forest but dont quote me. The journey to Paujil started as a 5 hour unairconditioned bus ride from Bogota at over 2500 meters, down the mountainside to less than 500 meters. At the beginning the trip, the passed out barf bags and yes some passangers used them.