We started at 8AM, had breakfast, disassembled the tent, and arranged all the equipment for the long walk. We left our packs hidden in the bushes and started the walk with our day packs. Some later, Carlos will take them in horses to our next camp site.

The walk was difficult, but nothing serious, through a beautiful valley of fraylejones. We continued our hike climbing more and our over stone trails. That single day we hiked 1000 mtrs to up to 4500 mtrs. (a personal record!). Could you believe I forgot to bring something for lunch? I am such an amateur…      Fortunately, Leo (our 2nd guide) kindly shared his soup/tuna with me. We had lunch besides a beautiful pond, full of fraylejones and crystal waters.

Finally we arrived to the camp site after 6 hours of walking. That was a significant test of my physical conditions. The site was basically a small plateau between the dust, and rocks.

There is no vegetation at this altitude. A short walk from here was the “Laguna Grande de la Sierra”, surrounded by the “Concavo”, “Toti” and “Pan de Azucar” peaks. We would try to climb the last one during the next day.

What a gorgeous, pristine, cold and isolated place! Fortunately, only another tent was there—two young park rangers (how could somebody work at this altitude and conditions?). Night there was simply miserable, strong chilly winds smashed my tent for hours. Head aches also prevented me from getting a good sleep. My thumbs started to crack because of the cold and dryness, making the disassembly of my tent the following day a painful operation. In addition, the strong winds did not helped much.

We started our descent at 9AM, leaving our still heavy packs to be picked up by horses later to “La Esperanza”. We arrived there after 4 hours of walking. I can feel that my body is responding better to altitude. We had a yummy trout for lunch, and a 4WD took us to the “Finca de los Herrera”— a beautiful finca conditioned for campers, like 20 mins from “La Esperanza”. We pitched our tents, then I had another chilly shower (call me masochist!), dinner and a good night sleep. This was our coldest night during the trip—anything liquid left outside was solid ice the next morning.

We started the day  not so early – around 7:30. Carlos, our guide cooked a delicious chicken and egg soup (changua). BTW, I had a fairly good night, not so cold.
A 4WD took us and our equipment to a small lodge/restaurant/grocery (“La Esperanza”) in the end of the road to La Laguna Grande de la [...]

 
The bus trip was long, during the whole night but without incidents. Unfortunately I could not see much of the scenery.
View Larger Map
Guavita cathedral was lovely, very different. We arrived early in the morning to this cold, remote town in the mountains. I grabbed a coffee in the main plaza and good [...]

A faily good portrait of a remarkable woman:

I would love to see more women like her, specially here in LatAm..

What are the challenges in porting your existing ASP.NET/SQL Server applications to Azure?

If you plan to use SQL Azure then migrate your DB to Azure first. Below you will find some tips to perform this process. Yes, you will find lots of things that do not work on SQL Azure. The good thing [...]

<Beware: Spanish Ahead! />
Es difícil encontrar un libro y especialmente en español, donde el tema central sea los viajes y no se centre solo en describir las maravillas de un sitio o un recorrido a través de espectaculares fotos. Es difícil encontrar uno que realmente se diferencie de una típica guía de viajes, donde el [...]

Thanks god is Friday! Time to breath some fresh air, go out and do some hike.
Want to see my last known position? Check this out:
http://share.findmespot.com/shared/faces/viewspots.jsp?glId=0fsO8qVuo7rat0EBdioLWddeqUvKpLeMk
See you out there!
Off Topic:

Should I use an ORM tool like SubSonic, nHibernate, or .netTiers? Which one of these have the best performance? I am current using bare DataReaders (which are [...]

I am suffering with the overheating issues of my new DELL Latitude E6400 (some Inspiron models included too). I love this machine, but this problem is getting me crazy. At least I am not the only one with the issue, and hopefully DELL will release a BIOS soon update to handle it, which looks more [...]

[Beware! Spanish Ahead]
Hace un tiempo empecé a leer sobre SCRUM y como esta “metodología” podía manejar algunos de los innumerables problemas que aquejan los proyectos de desarrollo de software. Lo más interesante que encontré sobre SCRUM es que está orientado completamente a los resultados: “software funcionando que implemente lo que el cliente quiere”, además que [...]

Have you ever watched a National Geographic documentary or read a book about some gringo-loco spending months in the middle of a lost tribe in Africa, or simply walking from Turkey to Tibet? Did you ever wonder how this people do that? Are they millionaires?, do they simply receive a juicy paycheck every month with [...]