Uphill Both Ways

About forty miles outside of Bogota, the capital city of Colombia, is a village on the far side of the Rio Negro. The village's only lifeline to markets and schools and the rest of inhabited Colombia is a pair of steel cables, a half-mile long.

The footage, linked here, of people taking the zip line has been floating the internet for a few years.

The river gorge's span of a half-mile yields heights in excess of 1300 feet and speeds up to forty miles an hour. One cable goes one way, the other cable the other way. Riders, on average sixty a day, supply their own pulleys and sitting rope.



Imagine coming to a cable, setting your iron pulley on it, wrapping a rope under your tush as a cradle and hooking it to your pulley, and shoving off...soon dangling higher than the Empire State Building travelling at 40 mph. Did you see that footage? They use sticks for breaks! They transport their young siblings in cloth sacks!

How awesome is it knowing when you land on the other side of the gorge that you have to hike back up--not only once, but both ways?