Bogota

Well, our journey to Bogota turned out to be one of the very, very few major delays on the whole trip so far. The landslide we'd been told about at the bus terminal managed to hold up our bus for a good 3.5 hours, and then when we did start moving we crawled along due to the tailbacks. In the end the supposedly 7 hour journey took about 12 hours.

But it wasn't so bad at all - the bus left the terminal pretty much on time, but only got 15 minutes down the road before hitting the police roadblock where we had to wait for the blockages to be cleared. Luckily we'd stopped at a group of small restaurants, so we just got out of the bus and had a snack and a drink.

After waiting around in the cafe for a couple of hours it was kinda lunchtime, so we moved to a nicer restaurant just up the road to have lunch and relax a bit more before reboarding the bus and heading off. The traffic tailbacks made our progress rather stuttered, as we'd move well for 15 minutes, then be held up for 20 minutes, then move for a good bit again before the next holdup. Anyway, the lush green mountainous scenery really did help pass the time, and in fact it was a pity the we were so badly delayed as the scenery was still very impressive when darkness fell about 5:30pm.

It meant we arrived at Bogota bus terminal at 10:15pm (which at least meant there was no city traffic to hold us up even further at this time on a Sunday night), but we were both too tired to bother with our usual local buses into the city centre, so we opted for a dreaded taxi. Luckily here in Bogota though the taxis are very well regulated and so you first tell a girl at a counter the address you want to go to and she gives you a slip of paper for the driver with the price firmly fixed - so no chance of us getting ripped off. Every major city's bus terminals and airports should have this system!

Again due to the total lack of traffic we zipped into the centre (9km away) and found our hostel easily. It was a relatively expensive place compared to everywhere else we've stayed in Colombia, but luckily Sarah had had the foresight to ring a few hostels earlier that morning (knowing we'd be arriving late at night), and we knew this was the cheapest option of those mentioned in the guidebooks.

Anyway, I immediately had a very welcome hot shower - Sarah had told the receptionist in our hostel in Armenia that one of the electric wires for our shower was broken, even though I told her not to mention it as you just had to manually fix the wires together (dangerous of course, but not if you were careful). Naturally, as I had feared, they then removed the electric shower head completely when we were out, and so we had no hot water at all that night or the following morning (they told us it would be replaced later that day, but we were leaving early).

So the next morning, after a fantastic sleep we did our usual city exploration. I really liked Bogota immediately, as our hostel was right in the middle of the old town and was surrounded by nice cafes and restaurants, and a lot of students milling about, which of course gave the cafes a vibrant bustling liveliness.

Most days we visited the excellent museums, with the gold museum being the best (apparently it's one of, if not the, most important gold museums in the world). Also interesting was the police museum, with it's ground floor section dedicated to the hunt and killing of the famous drug overlord Pablo Escobar (a dedicated unit of 500 police officiers hunted him for 2 years). We had a lovely young police officier guy as our free guide - in Colombia everyone has to do compulsory service, either 2 years in the miliary or 1 year in the police, and our guide was nearly finished his year of service and was about to head to Belfast to study medicine (so he was keen to practice his English, asking us things like what does 'posh nosh' and 'namby pamby' mean!).

We took a day-trip out to see a famous cathedral carved out of a salt mine about 50km outside the city in Zipaquira (there is a bigger salt mine and cathedral outside Krakow in Poland that I should have visited when I was there with Mullins, but someone at the time told us not to bother or something, d'oh!). It was easy-peasy to get the excellent, but crowded, Transmelio bus to it's terminus (although we had to kill time on the Internet waiting for the first bus at 9am), and then an instant connection on a local bus to the town of Zipaquira. A bit of aimless wandering through the nice small town finally got us to the site of the cathedral in the outskirts of the town.

We had a great English-speaking guide, and the tour lasted about an hour, passing the 14 stations of the cross, each carved directly from the salt of the mountain, before arriving at the vast cavern of the cathedral 180 metres below the surface. All very impressive indeed, although the 3D video show at the end was a bit naff.

On the way back to Bogota I wanted to stop off at a place called Chia to check out a famous restaurant that both our guidebooks highly recommended. It was all a bit of an ordeal in the end though, as it took us a while to find the small bus terminal in Zipaquira, and then the local bus only dropped us on the outskirts of Chia. I walked around for a good bit trying to make sense of the street numbering system, but that turned out to be a fruitless exercise in utter fustration. I was pretty annoyed that the guy on the bus had mislead us (we were obviously tourists but the bus didn't go anywhere near the centre of Chia, which was obviously where we wanted to go - instead they'd dropped on the main highway on the outskirts of the town). Anyway, after another local bus to the centre, and then more aimless wandering trying to get our bearings again and asking various clueless locals for directions (always a dodgey thing to do as you can never trust the answers, even if we could understand the language), we finally found the restaurant.

Luckily both the guidebooks were right - it really is a fun place. It's all a bit mental really, although the website does a good job of capturing a sense of it. It's a huge, sprawling, darkly lit cavern of a place, with every inch of it covering in nonsensical tat and junk that makes it feel a tiny bit like an old Irish pub down the country, but on a much bigger and madder scale.

It's also a very expensive place, although it doesn't seem to cater much for tourists (menu was only in Spanish, and none of the many waiters or waitresses spoke English - they had to get the manager to explain some of the local deserts to us). But it's famous for it's meat, and our fillet mignon was superb (I also ordered another morcillo, the Argentinian black pudding, but it still wasn't as good as the real Argy ones I've had - definitely one of the foods I'll miss big time from this whole trip). After getting lost again on the way back to the local bus terminal (!), we managed quite easily to get back to our hostel.

Once back in familiar territory we had a much needed drink in the very cool Cafe Pasaje again (another top spot mentioned in the Footprints guidebook, but not the Lonely Planet, with a very good description here (that guy tried to sell us his musty books both times we were there, and we also had 2 sets of emerald dealers sitting either side of us the first time)), and then a bit of a stroll while Sarah went home to bed.

Next morning was lazy enough as the buses to Santa Marta in the north all left in the afternoon, so we strolled around to another hostel that we knew had a book exchange (I got the excellent SuperCapitalism, which I'd recommend to anyone). Then we had time for a leisurely smoothie before trying to get a local bus to the bus terminal. After waiting on the supposedly correct street for about half-an-hour we gave up and just got a taxi - I think the normal traffic was diverted or something and so buses to the terminal were also diverted, but we couldn't understand the taxi drivers explanation, so god knows...

We hadn't booked onward travel, as usual, but we only had a couple of hours to wait for a bus (and the fare was half-price, as they are always negotiable when you just show up). So after killing more time on the Internet and a nice tripe soup for lunch (which, of course, Sarah wouldn't touch!), we boarded the bus, which left right on time. 21 hours later we arrived in hot and clammy Santa Marta on the North Colombian carribean coast. I felt surprisingly fresh after the overnight journey, we both seem to be well used to the long bus journeys now.