Adventures of a South America Nomad: Ipiales

The final city in Colombia. It feels like I've been here for a whole other lifetime. Canada seems so far away and everything in it. Even though I know it's only a flight away. On the border of Ecuador is a town called Ipiales. There's not much to this town except for the Santuario de Las Lajas. I was told about this place by Jeffrey and his mother's bathroom calendar. This post is dedicated to them.

The drive to Ipiales was something else as well. The bus was on roads that you only see in car commercials. So many mountain s-curves. Of course, the driver didn't care that he was going way too fast around the turns. He was trying to make up for lost time. I left Popayan at 10am and didn't get to Ipiales until around 7pm. The bus had a flat tire, and then we stopped for lunch, and then we stopped in Pasto. The hotel in Ipiales was only $25,000 pesos. Which is a steal considering some hostels I paid $22,000 for a shared room and shared bathroom.

It was an amazing drive out to the church. There are quite literally rolling hills. With farms and about a million shades of green. It's postcard perfect. On the way to Lajas, the driver stopped at a lookout point and told me to take a picture.

The collectivo only takes you to the top of the hill and you walk down past about a hundred little shops. This place has really been pimped out for the tourist hordes. There weren't too many people today, probably because it was a Thursday...and 10am. One nice thing about the walk down was this painting.

This church is dedicated to Our Lady of Las Lajas. There are plaques all along the pathway down to the church thanking the virgin for the miracles she provided. The photo below shows just a sample of what was there. There were thousands of plaques there.

The back wall of the church is the mountain! The back story to this church is that a lady and her kid were caught in a storm and took refuge in this valley. They were protected throughout the whole storm by an image of the Virgin Mary in the mountain face. I tried to see it when i was there...I couldn't. But I believe she believed it was there. So did a lot of other people, or else this church would not be here.

It's truly a surreal experience when you spend a lot of time at home looking at pictures of a place online or in books, and then you are actually there. It still doesn't seem real at times that I'm here. But I look at the stamps in my passport and I realize...Yup! I'm in South America. I actually did it. And I have no regrets.