Day 500 – Paso del Mango to Minca
From paradise, back to paradise
Today we woke up at Sierra San Juan guest house and had some nice pancakes for breakfast. After packing our packs, we left at around 9.30am. It was another amazing guest house that we were sad to leave.
The hike back
Along the way, we stopped at the river crossing just out of town to take another dip in the water. We knew that a long hike was coming.
The rest of the journey was just going in the reverse direction of what we did when we hiked towards Paso del Mango (Day 497). This meant that the majority of the 15km hike would be uphill.
Unfortunately, this also meant passing the stable with the howling dogs. We were wishing for the best, but were prepared for the worse, with large sticks and a few rocks at the ready. We weren’t lucky this time.
The dogs were all awake and ran towards us, barking madly. The 5 dogs attempted to surround us. They ignored the rocks (that missed) and the only thing that kept them at bay was us swinging our sticks. We managed to keep them back as we passed the stable.
After 10 minutes, there were two paths we could continue along. We couldn’t remember any of this area so we tried to use our phone’s GPS to orientate ourselves. The thick foliage wasn’t giving us a reliable signal. As we tried to get back on track, we kept arriving at dead ends or going further from the path shown on the Maps.Me App.
We finally decided to double back and we instantly realised that in the haste to escape the dogs, we had taken the wrong path. As we passed the stable again, the dogs started barking but this time there was a man who came to see what all the noise was. He called off the dogs and we kept going along the actual path back to Minca.
Minca
Thankfully, there were no other events like this along the 7.5 hour hike. We were exhausted once we arrived so we stopped at the Italian Restaurante Santisabella for a few rounds of drinks. It was almost 5pm.
We had booked another night at our favourite Finca Hostal Bolivar in the Casa Mango dorm rooms. The owner had decided to give us a free upgrade to the boutique hotel, Casa Maracuya.
Initially I was sad to hear this, as I was looking forward to the dorm room that I had called home for almost a month. But once we entered Casa Maracuya, the sadness was gone. We were still in the dorm room here, but it was a very nice dorm room. My favourite feature were the power outlets inside the lockers, which are perfect for charging a laptop or phone securely.
Since we had left our large back packs at our luxury treat hotel, Siembra Boutique Hostel, we had to go and pick them up. We were able to witness a very beautiful sunset along the way.
After picking up our back packs and returning them to Finca Hostal Bolivar, we had much needed showers. Then for our last meal in Minca, we wanted to have a burger from the restaurant, Lazy Cat but it was packed. There was actually a line of people waiting to get in.
We went back to the Italian Restaurante Santisabella for another tasty meal. It was very busy here too, but we were able to sit down straight away. However, the food took over an hour to come.
After dinner, we came back to our hostel and fell asleep straight away.
Travelled January 2020