We didn’t sleep well at all.  It was incredibly hot and there were tons of mosquitoes.  Not only was there no roof on the rooms, but the side wall of the hotel was also open near the top, so insects could just come in and fly down into the rooms.  On top of this, there were no nets over the beds, so we had to choose whether to sleep under the covers and melt, or sleep exposed and get eaten - not a good choice.  We got up for good around 06:30, and had breakfast at 07:00 with Lucy.  She said others had complained about the lack of roof, but for sex noise reasons - apparently they didn’t want to wake the neighbors.

We departed at 07:30, doing our best to avoid all of the stray dogs in Villaviejo.  It wasn’t that far to get to the beginning of the desert, but we kept driving past various trailheads (and even two buses!) until we stopped at the trailhead for the Xilopolos trail.  After not chatting for much of last night, Lucy was much more verbose this morning, telling us about the area, the birds, the reptiles, etc.  The word Xilopolos refers to fossilized trees that dot the area.  She also told us that the Tatacoa desert is not really a desert, but instead a dry forest.  The area does get occasional rain, and because of this, the area was much greener than we’d expected.

Additionally there were quite a few types of birds, including a pair of owls, lots of vultures, some saffron finches, kestrels, and more.  The trail had a couple very narrow areas, almost like slot canyons in the American southwest.  We spent a little over an hour on the Xilopolos trail, then got back in the vehicle and backtracked to another trail, Los Hoyos (the holes).  It was breezy outside and it was cloudy, so it was almost comfortable.  We just hoped it wouldn’t rain, because the narrow paths turn into rivers with muddy bottoms the instant it starts raining.  Los Hoyos was a shorter hike, almost like a miniature version of the American southwest and the various features carved by rivers over the millenia.  We saw some canaries and some goats, but aside from them, this hike had less greenery and wildlife.  It was more interesting for the topography, which Lucy said was noticeably different from just two months ago.

Our third stop was the area called Cuzco, which isn’t intended to have any relation with Peru or the Incas, and no one seems to know the genesis of the name.  It was much redder soil, and really resembled Bryce Canyon.  There was some asshole French guy climbing on some of the rock formations, and the two of us and Lucy bonded hating on him.  This area had a lot of cacti and some more birds, including a tropical mockingbird and several vermilion flycatchers, one of which was in the middle of a costume change, so to speak, going from gray to red.  Lucy pointed out Tatacoa’s penis, the lone hoodoo in the area.  We showed her some pictures from Bryce we took back in 2020 and she was blown away.

We wrapped around 11:15, not able to do the longer route through Cuzco because of time constraints, but we very much enjoyed the parts we got to see.  Back at the vehicle, Lucy showed us some of her bird drawings - very impressive.  We managed to get out of the desert without it ever raining on us, thankfully.  We drove back to Villavieja to have lunch at Sal…si puedes.  The menu seemed very Peruvian to us, and it turns out we weren’t wrong - the chef used to work in Peru.  Justin had the Lomo Saltado, and Crystal had the Chaufa de pollo.  Lucy also had the Chaufa.  

We left the restaurant around 12:15 for a long drive up to Armenia.  We were supposed to have flown this afternoon, but our flights changed multiple times, and to multiple different airports near Armenia, to the point where we gave up and just decided to travel by vehicle.  The first part of our ride was actually by ferry, a small ferry to cross from Villavieja to Aipe across the Magdalena River.  We were trying to remember where all we’d been on tiny ferries like this, and we could remember only by the Tsingy in Madagascar and crossing the Daintree river in northeast Australia.  

As we continued to drive, we were making good time, and we were wondering why Lucy thought it was going to take us 9 hours to get to Armenia.  About halfway up to Armenia, Lucy told us she’d been mistaken, and it would be only like 5-6 hours, which was more in line with what we were expecting.  We did slow down a bit when we turned from heading north to heading west, as we started ascending and it started raining on us.  The area around Ibague reminded us of Highway 11 through Kurtistown on the Big Island.  Considering that Crystal used to get her coffee there, perhaps that makes sense.  As we approached Armenia we spotted some of the Quindio Palms on the hillsides above us.

We arrived at our hotel, the Bio Habitat Hotel, right at sunset.  It was way fancier than where we’d woken up.  Our room was near the back, pretty far down a winding walkway from the lobby and restaurant.  There were tropical plants everywhere, and privacy from other rooms.  But whoever designed it, while good at visuals, was not very good at logistics or practicality.  Our room had a cold shower, which became hot if we turned off the shower and turned it back on, so each of us started and stopped the shower over a half dozen times.  Also, the front door, which resembled a big sliding door you’d use over the front of glass doors at night, had a latch in the very corner of the room, obscured by the shelving for the bathroom, to the point we had to illuminate the lock area with our phones just to see how to open the door - if we needed to exit in a hurry from a fire or some other issue, we'd have been in trouble.

It was like the hotel was trying too hard, and either didn’t have the experience and/or the interest to do things correctly.  Everything looked great, it just didn’t work great.  Dinner was more of the same.  They didn’t have paper menus, just QR codes.  But because the QR codes were carved into wood, the phone cameras couldn’t make out the codes, and we just looked like idiots trying to take pictures of a block of wood.  Moreover, we had our phones on airplane mode to save roaming, but the link for the wi-fi was also on a QR code, and it didn’t work either.  There were also paper napkins, which, if you know us, we don’t care about at all.  But paper napkins at a "fancy" place without paper menus (or even physical menus at all) is kind of hilarious.

The food and drink were good, however.  We each ordered margaritas (multiple), and tacos de cordero.  The citrus (something like a calamansi) that came with the tacos was perfect to add to the margaritas, to make them a bit more tart.  We shared a dessert after dinner, and then walked back down the hill to our room and crashed.  The bed was nice - to their credit they definitely got that part right.