Mass Civilization = Minority Vulture

Last Saturday, I took a day trip to the Parque Nacional Purace a couple of hours outside of Popayan in southern Colombia. It is incredibly remote, and a bit of a pain in the arse to get to. After a weird conversation with the purveyors of bus tickets (they kept telling me that a scheduled later bus wasn't "seguro", which I now think, having seen the roads and the absolute lack of transport on them, meant that it wasn't a sure thing), I hopped on a bus at 6 am. Which meant I got to the nearby town of Purace a full hour before I was meant to meet my guide. Fortunately, she was flexible and we both ended up hitching a ride into the actual park with none other than "el jefe", the guy that runs the whole shebang. While there are many beautiful things to see in the park, like these sulphuric thermal springs bubbling up from the volcano...



...there was one reason I really want to go to the Parque Purace. To see one of their three surviving Andean condors, some of the only wild condors in the whole country. Lonely Planet said that you can actually feed the condors with the park rangers on Saturday morning, which is why I scheduled my trip last weekend. But alas, that isn't the case. Apparently, there is an ongoing dispute between the government and the local indigenous population regarding the feeding of condors, so they don't tell tourists when the feedings occur. Fortunately, my guide was indigenous, and her friend brought along a pail of meat to set out on the feeding rock.

Then, we sat back to wait. About an hour later, a beautiful lady condor arrived. And while she never actually ATE anything, she did fly around our heads for about thirty minutes.

Condor in Parque Purace, Colombia from Tina Cone on Vimeo.

And I have a confession. While that lovely condor was flying overheard, it wasn't Simon & Garfunkel that I heard in my head. Instead, all I had in my brain, on repeat, was this:



Did anyone else love that cartoon as much as I did in the eighties?