Bogota

After a nauseating breakfast of a battered hammy thing which was lukewarm and wont to repeat on us for around eight hours it was bus time again.
The Lonely Planet advises to haggle over the price for bus tickets in Colombia as they are apparently not fixed so I gave this a whirl at the bus station in Medellin.

"How much for two tickets to Bogota?"
"50,000 pesos each"
"HOW much? (shakes head). I'll give you 35,000"
"No, the price is 50,000 each"

100,000 pesos and twenty minutes later we were off and looking forward to the nine hour journey because now we're back out of chicken bus territory a long ride affords us an opportunity to relax.

After the lunch stop we began to climb, the road clinging to our first sight of the Andes. Right hand bends were fine but lefts saw the front of the bus hang over 3000 ft precipices and if we met anything coming in the opposite direction we moved further out towards thin air.
It was genuine heart in mouth stuff at times and though we obviously made it (because you're reading this) that did seem genuinely in doubt at times.
I think I'm going to try to sleep on future bus journies; I'll trade seeing the countryside for keeping heart palpitations and clammy palms to a minimum.

The nine hour journey turned out to be ten and a half with the last 45 minutes stuck in the notorious traffic of Bogota as darkness fell.
There were scores of cyclists on our three lane highway, most dressed in black, all without lights and helmets and most weaving in and out of traffic with gay abandon.
As a cyclist who has spent hundreds of pounds on his lights in an effort to see and be seen in the UK this made me wince. I dread to think what the mortality rate is.

As we knew we'd be arriving at dusk we had booked ahead. We opted for a hostel in the old town which was, rather inconveniently, 10km from the bus station.
This necessitated the purloining of my least favourite mode of transport, a taxi, from the bus station.

Firstly we queued up to tell an official in a perspex box where we were travelling to: El Centro, at which point he issued us with a small paper ticket bearing the legend 'El Centro', as far as I can tell a completely pointless transaction.
We then walked outside to the rank, watched the nice family saloon sized car pull away with one passenger and no luggage and the minuscule Hyundai Atoz roll up for us and our packs.

I showed our driver the address of the hostel and asked him if he knew it.
He didn't really answer, just sort of mumbled and drove away.
When we stopped at some lights I asked again if he knew our hostel or even the address.
This time he answered in the negative but the language barrier prevented us from asking what he was going to do about that. That we sped in a seemingly definitive direction filled us with hope that he had something up his sleeve and he would see us to our digs one way or another.

Sadly that proved not to be the case. We reached 'El Centro' and just drove round and round, our driver muttering to himself and shaking his head and us getting more vexed with every passing minute.
It became obvious that he might never find the place and that he was unlikely to ask anyone for assistance either so we ended up hollering out of our windows to ask for help.
We sat captive in that cab for a full thirty minutes. During this time we inexplicably pulled to a halt in a street full of tramps and had several of them slowly approaching our stationary vehicle like the ghouls in the Thriller video, we came to a steep cobbled hill which the car couldn't climb and we reversed the wrong way up more one-way streets than I can recall.

Finally I spotted the Tip Top sign and yelled at him to stop.
Only then did he flick the meter off and once we were on the pavement asked for 18,000 pesos.
I gave him 10,000 and told him to consider himself fortunate: a potentially risky denouement to a wholly unsavoury episode.

The Tip Top was owned and managed by Maria and Felipe, a friendly and ultra helpful couple who had spent five years driving lorries in the USA and as such had a smattering of English.
Maria tried to explain to us there and then all of the delights of Bogota, descriptions of museums and good places to eat but we had to cut her short as we were frazzled.
Early starts, long bus journeys and half-witted taxi drivers are not our favoured precursor to pleasant discourse.

We just wanted to eat and so Maria insisted on escorting us to a nearby restaurant but, disaster! It was closed. (Perhaps just as well, a three course meal was apparently around £2.50)
Instead we were shown to an Argentinian steak house where we ate chicken cooked in ale with peaches and fresh veg for just £6 and the friendly hostess practised her English on us.

A notable aspect of Bogota is that it sits at around 8500ft above sea level making exertion difficult for old farts. Also, once the sun begins to drop at about 1700 so does the temperature and we actually sat and shivered as we devoured our dinner wearing our flip flops.
By a stroke of luck I had failed to post a parcel of clothes home from Cartagena and I needed them now we were at this elevation, including the trusty old PJs.
Unfortunately, my nighttime attire could not mask the fact that the bed was more park bench than Park Lane. I think I'd liken it to sleeping on a big sandbag, only firmer.

The first thing we spied next morning, once we'd run around our room trying to get warm after our cold showers, was a 2000ft high mountain overlooking the city with a cable car ascending it.
Kerry is a sucker for any sort of extreme ride so we lethargically and breathlessly made for this, passing the university and Simon Bolivar's former residence en route.

We went inside the latter but the only aspect of it that tickled our fancy was the hilarious, thick Irish accent of the English language recorded guide we hired.

The cable car was spectacular; an almost vertical ascent and we stood right at the back too so we had the best view. The city sprawled for miles beneath us and we took some nice photos with the help of a couple of girls from Miami we met up there.

After a short walk round a section of the old town, where we stumbled across an extraordinarily beautiful red and white striped church, we were absolutely pooped and retired back to our quarters to try and get some rest before tackling a juicy steak in the steak house.
It might be us exercising excessive caution but we tend not to wander about cities in the shadows. In any case the food and service at the steak house were first class and dirt cheap so there was no point seeking an alternative.

During Tuesday night the shower in our room inexplicably turned itself on. As I'm akin to a corpse at 0400 Kerry had to get up to investigate but there was absolutely no rhyme nor reason to it. My watch alarm had gone off earlier too (I don't recall setting it, especially not for 0200), then again twice the next night so our stay had a slightly paranormal feel to it.

On Wednesday we took a day trip out of the city to the town of Zipaqueria. There is an old salt mine here, part of which was turned into an underground cathedral for the miners to conduct services.
It was a bit of a ball-ache to get to, what with us needing to take a bendy bus to a transport hub and then a local bus out to Zipa but to be fair it all ran as smoothly as Maria said it would during her thirty minute, broken English briefing that morning.

I have to say that that underground cathedral was one of the most amazing things I've ever clapped eyes on. There were umpteen naves, all lit with coloured lights with alters and crucifixes hewn out of the bedrock, which were awesome enough in their own right.
The party piece though was a huge chasm with massive cross, nativity, herald angels, pews and salt crystal waterfall.

The town of Zipaquiria was lovely too with its colonial cathedral and plazas. We stopped for a coffee and sat outside, getting chatting to two schoolboys whose English was limited to "Wayne Rooney" and "my teacher is gay".

By the time we arrived back in Bogota it was rush hour and workers were heading back out to the suburbs. As our bus pulled in, the doors opened to a seething mass of humanity desperate to get on-board and totally oblivious to the two poor gringos in their line of fire.
People poured on, a lady hit the deck and avoided being trampled by a minor miracle and we somehow managed to squeeze through the throng by employing tactics learned during rugby lessons at school.

Our third and final day in the capital was spent in the Museum of Gold and walking around the rest of the old town taking in the architecture and general ambience. There was a massive armed police presence in the city and, inevitably, some really ropey parts to counterbalance the old colonial wonders.
Overall though, Bogota is a fine city and there's plenty to occupy anyone for a few days though the altitude means you need to ease yourself into things.

Having booked our room on Booking.com I was asked to review it so that other travellers can make informed decisions about future bookings. To me it's a valuable resource for when I make my own bookings so I'm always honest in my appraisals.
My review of the Tip Top went something like: "Great host, friendly and informative, good central location, cheap accommodation and good wi-fi connection.
Bed hard as a board and shower best described as adequately pitiful."

As we waited with Maria and Felipe for a taxi to take us to the bus station she explained that she was opening another hostel and that when it came to review our stay she'd be very grateful if I would score her as highly as possible to help get her new business off the ground!
I promised her I would but felt pangs of guilt as we inched through the nighttime traffic back from whence we came.

Continuing south, the next place on our radar is San Agustin, a small town which serves as the base for various activities but primarily for visiting archaeological sites of the ancient San Agustin culture.
Whilst waiting for the bus two New Zealanders turned up with a kayak amongst their luggage.
Kerry and I have cursed our kayaks when unloading them from the van on Teignmouth seafront and putting to sea off the beach twenty yards away so I felt compelled to congratulate these guys on their backpacking around South America with one in tow.

This eleven hour journey was the usual experience of air-con set to "Arctic Winter", Hollywood movie with explosions and dubbed in Spanish and neck-cricking inability to find comfort but such fantastic people and experiences would greet us in San Agustin that any amount of grief getting there would have been worth it.