Colombia

Bogota

We arrived at the airport a bit worse for wear and queued up for the cash machine as guys in guns unloaded and reloaded them with stern, unhappy faces.

After managing to find a local minibus downtown, we crammed in, and Luke thought he spotted a photocopy of a note he had just been given in change…turns out in the end it was fake, but there must be so many in circulation that we managed to get rid of it later anyway.

I don’t know why, but my preconception of Bogota was hugely different to what we were driving through…very developed, lots of fast food places, a bit dirty and not very historic looking at all. I thought it would be a little like the towns in Mexico I had been to, but it wasn’t at all. Just a big, bulky looking city.

We made our way the hostel we had booked, and were staying in the Candeleria district. It was a nice hostel from the lobby, but we had seen reviews that this place was half tourists, half student housing. We were told that there had been a mix up with the room booking and they were trying to sort us out with a room…which turned out to be the owners. As I was having a shower, Luke was trying, really TRYING to get us new sheets. The girl brought up a new duvet, but Luke wanted her to bring up a sheet and pillow cases. She tried to say they were already clean...sure, apart from all the hairs everywhere??? She said she didn’t have a double sheet, and started picking the hairs off this mattresses and wiping the dirt off…to Luke’s disgusted face apparently! He tried again asking for some sheets, and eventually she came up with the brilliant idea of 2 single sheets put together…GENIUS!!! So much better than her picking off hairs! Some people?!?

We managed to grab some dinner before settling in for a very early night thanks to the early start that day.

The next morning, we headed to an internet café to print out our boarding pass. Viva Colombia is worse than Ryanair and tries charging you $25 for check in at the airport, so web check in it was. Only it was telling us we couldn’t as hadn’t paid?? Well, we definitely had. We later tried to just pay $6 each for being able to check in at the airport for this discount, but their website maths was pretty bad and somehow did $6 +$6 = $38. Now, I’m no expert at maths…but I’m certain that isn’t right! We tried calling them and emailing them to no avail, so decided to just see what happened at the airport.

We headed to the Gold Museum, quite an interesting one about the process, history and effect of gold mining. There were beautiful artefacts all over the place, from new to old.




Balloons anyone?

 

After that we headed to the main square which was covered in pigeons and people selling corn kernels to feed them with, amongst balloon sellers, fruit cup sellers and the odd crazy person.




At the cathedral

 

Our next stop was the police museum, for which we had our own English speaking guide, to whose tour I understood about 10%...not very fluent unfortunately, but he was very sweet and wanted to come and ‘meet London some day.’

At this museum, was the history of Pablo Escobar, his capture and some of his belongings, along with photos of him having been shot and fallen from a roof…they even had the roof tile he slipped from?!? They had his Harley Davidson there which had gold plating and was predominantly pink.




Pablo Escobar's sweet ride

 

We had a little snack which was two thin circular wafers with jam in the middle. Unfortunately as I turned a corner, a big gust of wind blew the jam into my face, my hair and my jumper. Classy!

We headed to an art gallery which housed some work from this artist called Botero. It was hilarious. He paints these pictures of fat people, some nude and some random ones. He even had a fat version of the Mona Lisa.



Orange diet not working...

And before we knew it, the next day we were heading back to the airport. Our stay in Colombia was brief. We only have just over 3 months to do South America, and Luke having done it before said the major cities were not much different from others and jungles and beaches, we could find further south anyway. Well, we also had a Galapagos flight in a couple of weeks so were off!

Luckily we weren’t the only ones on this flight with issues with their website, so everyone managed to get free boarding passes after a long wait, but we could see some unhappy faces of those who hadn’t bought bags online and had to fork put $40 each.

Before we knew it, we were off…another country done…




This'll make you smile...