Hiking at high altitude, 1,800 meters, in Selvatura Park. We were picked up at Casa Balbi, where we thought we could just walk; being Dutch, the kilometers don’t seem like much, but the elevation difference from 1,400 meters to 1,800 meters is a huge amount!
So it was very nice having the shuttle bus right outside the door to pick us up. We decide to do the Hanging Bridges route and then see if we feel like doing something else.
The hanging bridges is a route of 8 hanging bridges with a path, where you walk about 3 km, but the height differences are large.
Glasses on, glasses off, drizzle, big, thick raindrops, up to a heavy downpour. We experienced it all in the two hours we walked. These bridges hang at an altitude of 1,800 meters, which means walking right in the clouds. There is also a zipline route, which is even higher because it mostly goes over the tops of the trees. Who knows, maybe we’ll do that another day. But for now, at the end of the walk, we were fresh and wet.
Do you see that ‘dirty’ smirk of Arjan’s in the 1st photo, at the 1st bridge? It wobbles quite a bit and, with my fear of heights, I found it scary to walk across. The 2nd photo is at bridge 4 and by then it was already much easier to walk.
Everywhere you look, you see many shades of green and a great diversity of plants. Everything grows intertwined. Plants, trees, moss—all together, mixed together, and growing everywhere. Occasionally, the path is made around a tree.
We mostly looked up or around us. In the photo of Arjan, you get a small impression of how big all the plants and trees are here.
On some bridges you cannot see the end, and in other places there is a lot of moss, creating a somewhat eerie environment. You feel very small in the face of such nature.
The only animal we have seen is the Coatimundi/Coati, and a few monkeys on a path below us, at the entrance to the park. You do hear birds everywhere, though, and when the rain eases up a bit, all the sounds of insects come loose. It is never quiet. But at such a high altitude as we are hiking, it is not the best environment for seeing many animals.
As I started, we didn’t walk many kilometers, but we did climb a lot, according to the smartphone tracker. We enjoyed the natural beauty.
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