We Climbed a Big Rock: El Peñol, Colombia

There's no fancy way to dress-up this story.  Kyle and I climbed the 600+ stairs to get to the top of this huge rock.
How did this huge rock form?  Why on earth did someone build 649 stairs to get to a snack bar on the top?  Sorry, no answers to that stuff here, folks.  Even the internet seems to lack all that.  But it was a fairly amusing trip there.


Making Friends
We did this silly thing of visiting the rock on a Sunday, and the place is tourism central.  On top of being a Sunday, it was a 3-day weekend, so Colombians from near and far were flocking to visit the rock.  We did happen to meet an interesting family, that gave us a ride up to the rock.  Colombians everywhere are pretty hospitable, but this couple is Colombian living in NYC (she's a city bus driver), so they were particularly excited to see other Americans (of course Obama comes up!) and make sure we were enjoying ourselves. 

They even shared with us some sips of the locally made Medellín Rum and some fried cheese balls.  There's never a shortage of random things to happen while traveling.  They also offered us a ride home and to come on a boat ride with them, but given the rum drinking, we decided we'd opt for the bus...


Worse than Waiting in Line for a Roller Coaster
That's the short answer to: How was climbing 649 stairs?  Remember all the people I mentioned?  Well, there is one primary staircase that goes up and down what's really the butt crack of this rock, which means everyone was going up and down the SAME STAIRS.  Our guidebook left out these details, and walking up the stairs was really more like waiting in a slow line.


Well Dam!  
Really, it was a pleasant afternoon, and we got to eat lunch up on top of the most enormous rock I've ever seen.  One of the more interesting elements of it though was that surrounding this whole area is a man-made lake that was made when they decided to build a dam in the area.  With that decision, a whole town was submerged in water.  Some where on the vast lakes the cross of the town's church supposedly sticks out above the water, and I hear there is some interesting scuba diving you can do.


WHAT is wrong with people?!?
Okay, now I'll complain.  On the top of this rock, I saw what was absolutely one of the MOST frightening things in my life.  This coming from a gal that jumped out of a plane.  Some idiot of a father decided it was a good idea to balance his one-year old son on the top of the "guard rail."  Mind you, we are hundreds of feet up in the air, and we're ON A ROCK!

This photo was taken while the man was actually still holding onto his son.  Oh, and luckily when the kid fell, it was forward towards his dad, and not left or right onto barbed wire or, well, backwards.  Stranger yet, the whole extended family was watching this: mother-in-law, grandmother, some uncles.  It was horrifying.  Now this in no way is a knock on Colombians, just this absurd family.  It's always that 1% that gets noticed, huh.


The whole day ended well though, we bought a red and blue popsicle on the way down the hill.