I love visiting Colombia, for much the same reasons that I love visiting the Bronx: both are saddled with outdated reputations that scare people away from visiting, which makes for fewer visitors, which makes them even better places to visit.  So when I arrived at 5 a.m. last Tuesday in the sleepily romantic colonial city of Popayán, capital of the Cauca department in southwest Colombia, I figured the only problem in finding a place to stay would be waking up the overnight clerk in whichever hotel was closest to the bus station.  I was met with a rude surprise: Popayán had been discovered! Not by tourists, mind you, but by the International Conference of Educational Information Technology, which had snapped up pretty much every decent hotel room in town.  My savior was the drowsy but smiling overnight guy at Hostel Trail Popayán– the standard gringo backpackers’ choice and, not coincidentally, Lonely Planet Colombia guide’s official recommendation. He said I could hang out in the TV room until dawn, and could move into a room — a cramped single room with shared bathroom and no style to speak of for 28,000 pesos ($15.50 at 1,800 pesos to the dollar) — that would be available the next night.  It turned out that I didn’t need to wait until dawn. Tuesday was market day in the nearby town of Silvia, where Guambiano Indians would soon be flooding into town from the surrounding hills to buy and sell food, clothing and other supplies.  I hopped a 6,000-peso bus ($3.35) and an hour later, I was downing a 3,000 peso ($1.65) breakfast of huevos pericos (Colombian-style eggs, scrambled with tomato and onion) and a very much needed café con leche in a restaurant called La Colina, across from the main square. Near me, a table of Guambianos in bowler hats and their distinctive blue capes and skirts with pink fringes were doing the same.  The Guambianos, who speak their own language and are known in Colombia for vigorously maintaining tradition, were not the only ones in for the market. Also down from surrounding communities were the Paeces, an indigenous people who wear more modern dress and, I discovered, are less likely to pelt you with orange peels when you try to take their picture.  I wandered through the indoor market and back to the plaza, where I somehow picked up a tour guide. A 70-year-old native of Silvia named Antonio Fernández said that in exchange for a tip he’d take me on a tour that included nearby offices of the governing bodies — or cabildos — of the Guambianos and Paeces, and I bit.  We went to the Paeces’ cabildo first, where I found not just tables, chairs and computers, but also jail cells and — could it be? — an old-fashioned pillory, one of those wooden contraptions that locks a criminal’s head and arms in place for public humiliation and sometimes a whipping. Mr. Fernández explained to me that indigenous groups in Colombia have their own semiautonomous justice systems and that pillories (which they call cepos) were still frequently used.  In the Guambianos’ office, I didn’t see a cepo, but I did bump into their vice governor, Jesús María Aranda, and Mr. Fernández finagled an invitation from him for the cabildo’s weekly lunch, held in a grassy vacant lot near the plaza. He was definitely earning his tip. A few hours later I was mingling with Guambianos, having soup and agua de panela, a sugary hot drink. Did I immediately hit it off with everyone I tried to chat with and learn all about their culture? No. Was everyone staring at me? So it seemed. Had I probably committed a dozen social faux pas without knowing it? Undoubtedly.  I spent that evening and the next day in Popayán, known in Colombia as the White City for its ubiquitously whitewashed colonial architecture (unlike Arequipa, Peru, known as the White City for the whitish volcanic stone from which it was largely built). There are endless colonial churches to see, a local cuisine to sample (Popayán was named Unesco’s first City of Gastronomy in 2005) a few museums to check out, and virtually nothing to do after about 8 p.m. on a weeknight.  Popayán’s best feature, though, is that it is a modern town functioning amid centuries-old architecture. So I found myself peeking into the open doors of business and government offices to catch a glimpse of the internal arcaded courtyards and wishing I had a reason to go in.  But many times, my staring (or asking) led to an invitation to enter. That is how I came to explore the University of Cauca’s buildings, which cover several blocks of the city center and were full of romantic courtyards stocked with scruffy students tapping on laptops.  I combined my architectural wanderings with a search for Popayán’s signature culinary dishes, most notably empanadas de pipián, corn empanadas filled with a peanut-based paste and often served with a spicy peanut sauce. Everyone I asked said the masters were at La Fresa, a rundown snack bar that was exceedingly hard to find because it no one knew the address, it’s not online, it has no external sign and it closes around 7 p.m. (It’s at Calle 5, #8-89.) My 10 mini-empanadas, which ran me just 2,000 pesos ($1.10), came out crisp and delicious, though I couldn’t help thinking it was kind of a cop-out for a city’s signature dish to be deep-fried; I mean, who’s not going to like it?  But my best find was the sweets stand known as El Mecatico de Aliria, recommended by a cellphone saleswoman I bought a SIM card from who knew neither the name nor address, just that it was a stand on Calle 6 across from Gasolina Extra (which is a shoe store, not a gas station). I did find it eventually, between Carreras 5 and 6, a brightly painted red and white country fair-style stand in the midst of tables stocked with plastic toys and pirated DVDs. Inside, a delightfully smiley woman named Maria Aliria Ortiz sold an endless variety of traditional sweets for a few hundred pesos (a dime or two) each. Recommended: the casado payanés, which you make by buying a buñuelo (sort of like a doughnut hole) and a liberal (a ball of soft, milky caramel paste called manjar blanco) and eating them together. Also recommended: everything else.  On Thursday, I took the early bus to San Agustín, where pre-Columbian megalithic sculptures have been found since the early 20th century. Many of the sculptures were often found by grave sites, and the pictures of them remind the untrained eye (i.e., mine) of a cross between the Easter Island statues and the monsters from “Where the Wild Things Are.”  On paper, the trip doesn’t sound hard — it’s just five or six hours by bus. In reality, it’s terrible: the roads are bad ,and the cramped buses that ply them are equipped with what can only be called an anti-suspension system that magnifies each pothole times infinity. In an undoubtedly related development, the bus I was on broke down along the way.  That actually turned out to be a boon, because it gave me not just the chance to stretch my legs but also to meet Alex Weber, a 25 year-old recent graduate from the University of Oregon with whom I’d end up spending much of the next two days.  I enjoyed hanging out with Alex and two women he had been traveling with, but they were what I refer to as Lonely Planet People, carrying the venerable guidebook under their arms the way an itinerant preacher might carry the Bible. So, not surprisingly, they had reserved space at the Finca Ecológico El Maco, the guidebook’s pick for lodging in San Agustín. They took a three-bed dorm, and 28,000 pesos ($15.50) got me my own little semiattached “chalet,” which at first seemed like a good deal but turned out to have a horribly moldy smell and water pressure in the toilet and shower that was next to nil.  Besides that, the place was fine (and the breakfast, with fresh fruit, homemade yogurt and fresh-baked bread, was a scrumptious bargain at 5,500 pesos, or $3). But I took a look at a half-dozen other hotels in the area, and if I could do it again, I’d do La Casa de Nelly, which is slightly cheaper, has a much more welcoming staff and a main house bustling with activity and comfortable places to sit.  Our first afternoon in town, we wandered the Archaeological Park, which displays many statues found on site along with the excavated tombs they were in or near; it also has a small museum and a “statue forest” with statues brought from other sites in the region. On our second day, three of us took a guided horseback ride from El Maco to some of the sights, which cost us each 30,000 pesos ($16.65), pretty good for a five-hour tour that passed through coffee-bush-covered hills and stopped off at archaeological sites where our guide, Pacho Muñoz, tried hard to answer our questions about the statues that no one knows all that much about.  He was more successful at finding us fruit to try (including a sweet granadilla, his and now my favorite fruit) and stopping off at a trapiche, an artisanal sugar cane mill where workers were boiling cane juice down to make bricks of the unrefined sugar called panela that is common in Colombian cuisine.  The food in San Augustín was unnotable, but Alex and I did have an excellent dinner on our final night, down road from El Maco on Calle 5 at a place called Mister Cuy (if you’re coming from town, it’s on the way to the Archaeological Park). I was eager to try the local specialty, asado huilense, thick pork medallions roasted after marinating overnight; the result (at least at Mister Cuy) was a flavor surprisingly similar to the Cantonese roast pork hanging in the windows of your local Chinatown. We accompanied it with a bottle of the anise-flavored Colombian liqueur known as aguardiente, and added salads, grilled sausages and dessert. A bit excessive, perhaps — it ended up being my most expensive dinner to date, at about $25 — but I needed fortification: I had just found out the bridge between San Agustín and Popayán was out, and the jolting, cramped bus ride back would be taking 10 hours instead of 6.
The Frugal Traveler scores a lunch invite from a vice-governor, discovers an irresistible sweets stand in Popayán and visits an odd archaeological site in San Agustín.