Especially is this the case when, in the dry season, travel is less onerous and when nothing can be more pleasing than the varying scenery. Here "dipping down into a delightful little valley, formed by a sparkling rivulet whose banks are edged with cane, bamboo and tropical trees, inter-wreathed with twining vines; there, circling a mountain-side and looking across at a vast amphitheatre where the striking vegetation, in wild profusion, is the gigantic wax-palm, that towers sometimes to a height of 100 feet; then, reaching the level of the oak and other trees of the temperate zone, or still higher at an altitude of 10,000 or 11,000 feet, the _paramos_, bare of all vegetation save low shrubs, which might be desolate were it not for the magnificent mountain scenery, with the occasional view of the glorious snow-peaks of the Central Cordillera. "At times the road is poor: now and then, cut into the solid rock of the mountain-side, towering sheer hundreds of feet above you, while a precipice yawns threateningly on the other side, it may narrow down to a scant yard or two in width; it may, for a short distance, climb at an angle of almost forty-five degrees, with the roughest cobble paving for security against the mules slipping; or in a stretch of alluvial soil, the ruts worn by the constant tread of the animals in the same spot have worn deep narrow trenches, characteristic of Andean roads, against the sides of which one's knees will knock roughly if constant vigilance be not exercised; worse yet, these trenches will not be continuous, but will be interrupted by mounds over which the mules have continually stepped, sinking the road-bed deeper and deeper by the iterated stamping of their hoofs in the same hollow, till deep excavations are formed, which in the rainy season are pools filled with the most appalling mud. Such is a fair picture applicable to many a stretch of so-called road in Colombia. "The 'hotel accommodations' on the way are poor, of course; one stops at the usual shanty and takes such fare as one can get, a _sancocho_ or _arepas_, eked out with the foods prudentially brought along. It is in such passes as the Quindio, too, when one reaches the _paramos_, thousands of feet in altitude, and far above the clouds, that one experiences the rigorous _cold_ of the Tropics. The temperature at night is nearly always below forty degrees; occasionally it drops to freezing-point, and one feels it all the more after a sojourn in the hot lowlands. No amount of clothing then seems adequate. Travellers will remember the bitter cold nights they have passed in the _paramos_."[2]