Category: Travel

Sat 8 Feb: Caribbean Coast ahoy!

DAY’S HIGHLIGHTS

• Taxi ride into Cartagena – akin to the bus out of Bogota just over a week ago; i.e. an assault on the senses!
• Getsemeni district – graffiti, artists, umbrellas, and cool bars
• Posh evening meal at ?

Say hello, Say goodbye

It was all going so smoothly – nice calm taxi ride (in contrast to the hundreds of MTBers huffing up the hill alongside us), hassle-free airport (with interesting shops – see below) and on-time flight. Until the wheels fell off. Literally. Or maybe it was a propeller. We couldn’t tell, but everybody had to disembark the plane and sit on a grass verge as loads of Avianca staff gathered round to fix ‘the problem’…including a man with a Black & Decker leaf blower?!

Cartagena

Left the mountains in the middle of the country at 1,700 metres altitude. Landed on the north Caribbean coast, 600km away at 2 metres altitude. It was noticeably hotter and stickier despite the salty air blowing in across the taxi rank.

An explosion of noise & colour

It was also noticeably busier…about 100 times busier than we’d been used to: the incessant honk of taxi horns, street vendors hassling you and shop salespeople trying to pull you into their bar, restaurant, emerald shop…whatever! A gentle stroll around Cartagena is not possible – it’s a military march avoiding all eye contact!

Our hotel was lovely – centrally located with a cute rooftop pool and our room was air-conditioned with its own balcony…a bit too centrally located as it turned out later that evening.

The Streets of Getsemeni

After meandering and sweltering around the Old Town, we headed off farther afield and found another district (Getsemeni) which had a totally different, uber-cool vibe. We had a late lunch there of pandora – a sort of pizza sandwich, with the usual fillings but between incredibly thin pizza-type dough.

There was cool street art graffiti, art installations and painters all around, so we wandered around the streets until almost sunset, then headed back to the Old Town for a posh dinner at a place we’d found earlier in the day.

Posh nosh for travellers

The nice thing about everybody wanting your money is that nowhere is out of bounds…including the posh hotels. They usually have a lovely open courtyard, complete with fountains or running water, some sculptures and a stylish cocktail bar. Hence very relaxing and a world away from the hustle and bustle out on the streets. So we got dressed up (OK, I was still wearing trainers but the rest scrubbed up alright!) and dined out posh for once.

Colombian sweets & delicacies from the airport shop

• Panucha – stuffed with milk & coconut
• Coquito – like an inside-out Panucha with coconut on the outside
• Cortado – Milk caramel
• Breva – figs with milk caramel

Fruit-flavoured chocolates
• Coco – Coconut
• Guyaba – Guava
• Arequipe – Milk caramel
• Mora – BlackBerry
• Piña – pineapple
• Maracuyá – passion fruit
• Uchuva – Goldenberry
• Lulo – Lulo! (a fruit particular to Colombia, evidently an aphrodisiac…aren’t they all?!)

TRAVELLERS’ TIPS

• If you’re a backpacker, the Getsemeni district is far cooler and inexpensive than the Old City.
• If you’re not staying in Getsemeni, stay centrally in the Old City…so you can keep popping back to your hotel for respite!

COSTINGS ($ = COP$,000)

• Taxi to Bucaramanga airport: $35 – took about 30 mins and quite a climb high up out of the city (but that was 7:30am Sat)
• Airport coke $5: not too bad really, and we were tempted in the airport shop by the hammocks which ranged from $150 (machined) to $250 (hand-made, much softer) and $400 (hand-made, not a clue?)
• Taxi from Cartagena to hotel: $15 – cool system where you pay as you line up in the taxi queue and receive a printed receipt.

“To head to Zipaquira, hop on a frequent bus from the Portal del Norte TransMilenio station, about a 45-minute ride from the city centre…”

Rough guide to Columbia

Sat 1 Feb: The 1st journey

DAY’S HIGHLIGHTS
• Salt Cathedral (once we found it) – pretty awe-inspiring…both the church itself and the sheer number of shops down there!
• Columbian drinking cyclists – loud salsa music, a table full of beers and a shoe shine after a 70km spin around the mountains…the coolest cyclists ever!
• Bus drivers and sprinting conductors – organised chaos but it all works…somehow

Getting out of Bogota…the hard way!

Bogota. 2,640m altitude. Breathless – literally! Having arrived around 3.30am, we found ourselves in manic traffic by 5.00am, having caught a taxi from the airport, heading for a bus terminal. Bit of a culture shock to say the least, having left a very grey and rainswept Heathrow the previous evening. The Rough Guide made it all sound so easy: “Just hop on a bus at the northern bus terminus…” Yeah, right!

Having been dumped at the side of the road (literally) by the taxi, we found our way into the bus terminus Portal. Evidently you needed to have some kind of Oyster card to enter first (didn’t know that), but we paid for something, then asked around until we found a red bus (not TransMilenio – those are Bogota only btw) which was going to Zipa (short for Zipacueta…keep up!), had our bags dumped in the hold, and were excitedly ushered on-board, having not yet paid, nor 100% sure of what we’d ‘agreed’ to pay, nor convinced we knew where we were going….oh well!

The rule of the road appeared to be simply that “Size Matters”. Hence, scooters gave way to cars who gave way to buses, who sort of gave way to trucks…whilst cyclists just seemed to do their own thing. Massive respect, but the lifespan of a Bogota cyclist can’t be all that long?

Zipa de doo da day!!!

We were thrown off the bus (in the nicest possible sense) by the side of the road in what must have been Zipa. We presumed. No room for explanations on a Columbian bus – the Roadrunner Conductor merely ushered us to the front, threw our bags from the hold onto the pavement and was off sprinting back on the bus again before we’d even had time to catch our breath. A little stunned, we wandered along the highway until we found a side road with a coffee shop. A Columbian was prescribed- it was still only 7.30am…going to be a looong day!

A salty stop

It’s what I call the “Shark Sonar Method” of finding your way around: you keep asking people the same direction repeatedly, and gradually hone in on your target destination…never trust just one person! For example:

“Excuse me – could you tell me the way to the Salt Cathedral? “

“Sure – just walk straight ahead and keep the mountains to your right…”

Wrong! The Salt Cathedral turned out to be halfway up a mountain, much to a certain person’s disgust (clue: blonde, carrying an oversized rucksack). In fact, to add insult to injury, once you were in the cathedral grounds, you were invited to follow a white line (representing a Pilgrim trail) snaking up hundreds of steps – cue ‘certain person’: “I am not a f*@#$% pilgrim!”

INRI – Iesus Nazarenus, Rex Iudaeorum

Wow! Spectacular didn’t really do it justice. One of only three salt cathedrals in the world (other two both in Poland) and absolutely immense. You follow an audio guide round which traces Jesus’s last day from conviction to crucifixtion in a series of (salt) sculpture montages, before the main ‘church’ reveals itself. Then, after the main church, there is a huge underground ‘shopping mall’, with shops, cafés and even a cinema carved out of the salt rock – I think the irony of Christ and the moneylenders was somewhat lost in translation down there!

The coolest cyclists in the world

We’re currently sitting in (what amounts to) a lock-up garage, Columbian dance music blaring out, tables groaning under the weight of empty beer bottles, and have just been bought a round by a pair of Columbian cyclists in the corner, one of whom is having his white cycling shoes polished whilst he necks back a beer!

OK, wind back an hour or so. It turned out that (contrary to the Rough Guide’s blithe advice), it was NOT possible to catch a bus directly to Villa de Leyva ‘VDL’). In fact, it seemed to be impossible to catch a bus anywhere near VDL: “You’ll have to go back to Bogota and take one from there”, was the most useful advice we received.

Undeterred, the Shark Sonar Navigation Method led us to a back street bus station in Zipa (more of a hole in the wall to be honest) and then on a 45-min bus journey to somewhere beginning with ‘B’? I thought it sounded a bit like Brianca/Brincon/Brindisi? – we’ve argued about this a bit, but neither of us can really remember (note: it was actually Briceño – I remembered the weird ‘amusement park’nearby complete with a Taj Mahal replica, called Jaime Duque). Here we were told to get off and cross a 4-lane highway to a man in a white shirt waving at us by the side of the road who told us to wait in the afore-mentioned lock-up garage until a bus to Tunja arrived. So that was how we found ourselves drinking beer with Columbian cyclists by the side of the road!

Weary but alive!

Finally arrived in VDL about 4pm – beautiful cobbled streets, packed with day trippers from Bogota (yup it was still Saturday, although felt like we’d been here for days already!); loads of bars, restaurants & cafés. Checked in, showered, resisted the temptation to crash into the incredibly comfortable huuuge bed, and headed back out to explore VDL.

Ended up having a few beers in a bar next to the sizeable (120m square) central plaza, watching the delegates from the Annual Astonomical Convention get steadily more drunk and fly drones into each other. Nothing really surprised us any more. Then it was pizza and crash by 9pm (2am UK time) as the thunderstorm raged around us.

Travellers Tips

• Columbians invariably give directions in quadros (blocks) though each person’s definition of a block seems to vary quite dramatically!
• Buses – board first, ask questions later! You pay on board on most buses…apart from when you don’t – you soon get told!
• Bus stations – intercity buses tend to stop outside the city (either a massive hub like Tunja or the side of a highway!) whilst local buses go from a forecourt somewhere in the middle of town…which may or may not resemble a bus station!

Costings ($ = COP$,000)

• For future reference, current XR: £1 = almost COP$4,500…so $45 = £10
• Salt Cathedral: $60 x2 (so £13 each…quite pricey but you do get am audio guide with that!)
• Bus to Zipa: $6 x 2 (but we also had to purchase that Oyster card thingy to enter the Portal del Norte which I think was $2.5 each…I really don’t know…it was a blur!)
• Other buses: $5 each to Briceño (45 mins; where we ended up in that drinking lock-up garage!) then $25 each to Tunja (1h45m; modern out-of-town bus station) where we changed onto a minibus for Villa de Leyva ‘VDL’ (1h10m; $8 each)
• Beers in lock-up garage: $4 each
• Beers in VDL main square: $6 each
• Large pizza for 2 in VDL: $45