Scenery Rules All

Despite an altitude of 2,561 metres (8,402 feet), Bogotá is in many ways not significantly different to many large cities, and one's arrival is certainly unremarkable. This is not the case with Pasto. You can tell before you arrive in the city that you are soon to be somewhere rather different.

Looking south at Pasto airport

The aeroplane's descent seems somewhat shorter than usual and the landscape seen out of the windows is very rugged and composed of tall mountains and deep valleys, but nothing prepares one for the way in which the earth rises up to meet the aeroplane. If your flight happens to be full, your aeroplane can use a disconcertingly large proportion of the runway in coming to a halt. This is unsettling principally because the airport lies on a small plateau with an almost sheer drop of over 400 metres (1,312 feet) at the end of the runway.

Looking north from Chachagui,

The airport is visible on the right of the picture.

On disembarking one is usually met by bright sunshine and temperatures around twenty-five to thirty degrees Celsius. Pasto airport is actually outside a small town called Chachagui which is about half-an-hour's drive from the city and some 726 metres (2,382 feet) lower in altitude. The plateau on which the airport is built is seen to be a part of a larger plateau which is punctuated by very deep and narrow river valleys – one might almost call them gorges. This larger plateau is flanked by mountains to the East and West and stretches on to the South with more mountains in the distance. The Northerly aspect is dominated by Volcán Galeras one of the most active volcanoes on the continent which rises some 4,276 metres (14,028 feet) above sea level.

The weather and views can be almost guaranteed by the fact that one's flight has arrived. The airport is frequently closed by clouds descending from the nearby peaks. That is not to say that one can always see the summit of Galeras. The volcano is often shrouded in cloud, but is usually visible in the early morning or on bright, sunny days.

Departing the airport and heading South on the Panamericana (a network of roads that run for about 29,800 miles from Argentina in the South to Alaska in the North) one passes roadside restaurants and hotels generally in one of two styles: either painted concrete with corrugated iron or flat roof; or wooden framed and roofed. These soon give way to the small town of Chachagui where almost all the buildings are of concrete of varying states of repair, before the region's typical rural scenery takes over for the journey to Pasto.

The basic building blocks of the scenery around Pasto are tall mountains and impossibly deep valleys. The road winds around the mountains giving an upward view not dissimilar in scale to many in Scotland or North Wales. In those places you would be near the foot of the mountains, with a loch or the coast on the other side of the road. Here there is an exceptionally steep-sided valley twice as deep as the mountain above is high.

Mountains to the south of Pasto

Much of this terrain is covered in forest, but it is truly amazing just how much of the land has been cultivated. The crops must generally be of very low-maintenance varieties or, more likely, the fields are tended by hand with the aid of at most a horse or an ox. Tractors would not be able to operate on the phenomenal gradients exhibited by these enclosures. In some ways this environment is reminiscent of some British scenery, only somewhat stretched on the vertical axis.

Mountains and clouds between the airport and the city

Where it all starts to become vaguely surreal from the point of view of a humble Brit is the point at which the weather starts happening below him. One glances down into the apparently bottomless valley to see clouds floating by a few hundred feet below. If it were not for the trees, houses, road-signs, crash barriers and the like that are clearly visible above the cloud; without the panoramic view afforded by the car windows and the distinctive ambience of the in-car environment one might almost imagine that the view were one from an aeroplane ten or fifteen minutes from landing.

Volcán Galeras from the eastern side of Pasto

The city itself is situated 2,540 metres (8,333 feet) above sea level in a natural bowl with mountains on all sides, the view of Galeras rising to the West uninterrupted by features other than urban erections. The crater (and approximate summit) is only about 5½ miles from the centre of the city and as a result the volcano looms over the town almost constantly. The view in other directions is probably shorter than even this, since the other mountains rise less far but at least as steeply.

Volcán Galeras wreathed in cloud

Galeras and its perturbations (a strong tremor - 4.1 on the Richer scale - shook the city a week or two ago at 3:15am) may be the most obvious definition of the Pasto experience, but it is not the mountains that are the dominant day-to-day feature here. No, it is the clouds that form a persistent part of the landscape that best define how Pasto looks. Individually they may be intangible and ephemeral, but collectively there are almost ever-present obscuring more tangible features of the city and landscape as effectively as the most solid of mountains or buildings ever could.