Bogota - 18-19 September 2011

We arrived at the main bus terminal in Bogota (the capital of Colombia) and stood in line for a ticket to catch a taxi to our hostel, the Cranky Croc in the La Candelaria suburb of Bogota. The taxi driver was struggling to find the hostel, luckily we had agreed the price upfront, but started getting worried he was just going to drop us off in the middle of nowhere. Bogota is not safe at night and so this concerned us both deeply. Eventually he found the place, thank goodness for that! The Cranky Croc was great, we really enjoyed it there. The beds were nice with clean sheets and big duvets to keep you warm at night. Bogota is actually really cold due to the altitude (2600m above sea level).

The next morning over breakfast we decided to go to Zipaquira where the Salt Cathedral is situated. (an underground salt mine that has been transformed into a Cathedral, where it’s still mined at night) The town of Zipaquira is about 2 hours away from where we were staying, a bit of a hack, but so worth it when we got there! We had an English guide for the tour of the Salt Cathedral, an absolute must if you visit!

John was great, he told us so much interesting information about the Cathedral and how they mine the rock salt now and in the past, it really is quite amazing. They mine tunnels out of the mountain that are 10m wide, 16m high and 100m long, they are massive! South America is very Catholic in faith and many people died in the mines over the years, so they built a temple in the mine to pray for safety and to mourn the death of those who’ve passed away. All the way down into the mine they have created areas that represent the 14 stages of Jesus’ crucifixion. These are all done really well with lighting effects. This all leads down to the cathedral which is huge and amazing. It is also a couple hundred meters underground!

The next day in Bogota we had one of the most fun days of sightseeing we have had on our whole trip so far! We signed up to do the Bogota Bicycle Tour. We rocked up and got some bikes and then waited for our guide to arrive. There were only a Spanish father and daughter and Tess and I on the tour that day. When Mike Ceasar arrived, neither of us thought too much of the guy, he was an oldish American, wearing an old long sleeve jersey, jeans and a floppy wide rimmed hat, riding a rather simple bike with a bag on the side of the front wheel. Never before has the saying “don’t judge a book by its cover” been more appropriate!

Mike moved to Bogota as a journalist and has been living in Bogota for the last 6 years. He was a fountain of knowledge and we could ask him just about anything and he usually had some great story to regale us with for each of the places we visited.

That day with Mike we visited such a diverse set of places, these are some of the highlights; we started with the Simon Bolivar Square where Bogota was founded in 1538!It is a pretty amazing square,with the Courts, Parliament Buildings and a cathedral on one of the sides too.  We then rode away from the La Candelaria district through Graffiti Alley and on to one of the largest fruit markets in Bogota. Mike took us into the market and cut open a whole lot of the exotic fruits for us to try, this was amazing and even Tess had a try of all the weird and wonderful fruits that day, except the avo of course!

Mike then took us for a little ride through the red light district in Bogota, they call this place the high socialisation impact zone! Prostitution is only legal in these zones. We visited a small coffee and cocoa factory and had the best coffee of our trip. Colombia exports most of its coffee and actually imports low quality coffee for local consumption. Colombia exports about 80% of the coffee they produce. From there we went to the cemetery and Mike amused us with stories about a whole bunch of the famous and infamous people that were buried in the cemetery. This was actually pretty interesting even though it may seem a little dull to you guys.

We cycled our way up through the main streets of Bogota and the next place we came to was the bull ring. There is a very short season in Colombia (Jan-Feb). They get matadors out from Spain and so this is the only time they have the fights.

That pretty much concluded the cycle tour. This day was so much longer and so much more fun than we expected it to be. We headed back to our hostel and got ourselves ready to go and catch a bus to Medellin. We asked the hostel to get us a taxi to take us to the bus terminal, when the guy arrived we asked the price, as you should always do, he just pointed to the meter indicating that is what we would get charged. We ended up getting ripped off paying 3 times what we paid when we first arrived. Both of us were SOO irritated by this as we had been cooking meals in and trying to save money to keep to the budget we set and this guy just ruined our day and our end to Bogota!