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One taxi, two buses and a couple of hours moving around with our home on our back and we arrived in Villa de Leyva. A little picturesque town with white houses where the rich of Bogota come to enjoy their weekends. The surrounding hills are very arid and they add to the wild west atmosphere. We stayed at a little finca in a small room with one double bed and one bunk bed. Every night we took the mattress down because the bed had no barrier so no protection from falling and we
The area surrounding Zipaquire, a small town about an hour north of Bogota, used to be covered by a very salty ocean millions of years ago. The water disappeared but the salt was left behind in the rocks. The indigenous people noticed that some rivers were salty so they collected water in jars, heated them so the water got evaporated while they can have the salt. When the Spanish arrived they started to exploit the salt on a much bigger scale – using mines to extract the salt directly from the mountain’s rocks.
Many of Bogota’s houses are tagged and many other have beautiful graffitis. Some of them are a real work of art. But not everybody is happy with this kind of art.
We learned that the city decided to restore the Candelaria neighborhood – the old town with its colonial houses, and this restoration means painting the houses and so deleting all the graffiti. They already painted a couple of houses and every time the city mayor in his war against graffiti published Continue reading
We liked Colombia and our backpacking tour so much we decided to go on another trip. We spent a week in the marina doing laundry, school, internet and simply resting. Then we took a flight to Bogota with no flight ticket back nor a rental car, this way we were free to decide where we go and for how long.
Just like our flight to Medellin, our flight back to Santa Marta was cancelled because the employees of Avianca went on a strike. We managed to find a flight to Cartagena instead and so we booked an apartment via airbnb for 3 nights and from there we would take a bus back home to our boat in Santa Marta.
We heard from other travelers that Cartagena was a big disappointment for them. That they did not understand
It’s four hours now that we are driving on the sinuous roads behind smoking trucks and nervous bus drivers. Google maps says we have another hour and a half until we get to Jardin. We learned to double the Google estimate when we drive in Colombia. But this time it seemed wrong the other way around – we have only 50 km left and in the last 20 minutes we could actually drive pretty fast with not too many obstructions.
Apart from being in the zona cafetera Salento is known as the gateway to the Cocora valley where the the wax palm, the highest palm trees in the world (they can reach 60 meters) grow. Every traveler we met talked about the Cocora valley hike so together with Imen and Mehdi we bought lots of fresh vegetables and fruits at the local market, some Colombian cheese (it looks like feta but without much taste) and drove to the start of the trail. We’ve been told it should take 5 hours but with kids and more than 800 meters
Salento, about 7 hours driving south of Medellin, is a little and quite town in the zona cafetera – the coffee zone. The hills around are full of, obviously, coffee plantation. They claim Colombia has the best coffee in the world though surprisingly there is no coffee-drinking culture in Colombia. Colombians drink tinto – a weak and very sweet drink that vaguely resemble coffee. Around Salento are many coffee farms where you can participate in coffee picking and learn everything you wanted to know about coffee from the flower to your cup. Continue reading
A small and picturesque village about 2 hours away from Medellin. Both we and Mehdi and Imen rented cars and knowing that it would be hard to follow each other driving to Guatape we decided to meet at the town’s square next to the church around miday. Google said it should take us about an hour and a half, it took us three. First because our little car had hard time climbing the steep hills outside of Medellin, second, it took some time to learn how to drive here
There is something special about this city. Some would call it ‘energy’ others ‘atmosphere’ but one thing is certain, Medellin is not like any other city we have ever visited.
The city look huge. And with more than 3 millions people living in is quite big. it fills up the valley at 1500 meters above sea level and then spreads all around the steep hills. Everywhere you look you see houses and more houses, from poor pueblos to high rising buildings.
