Brisbane to Barcelona: Bogotá

26 May - 1 June 2011

Thursday morning we left our hostel in Cusco early to get to the airport in time for a 8am flight to Lima, with connection to Bogotá. We got a quick breakfast at the airport before boarding our flight, the seats on the Taca plane were excellent, with heaps of room!

In Lima we still had left over Peruvian Soles so we spent some time cruising around the airport searching for a money changer, this was a waste of time as there were no cambios in the airport! A security officer said that there may be people outside the airport on the street willing to change our Soles but we were running low on time and had already been through customs! Another annoyance to this was that all the prices in the cafés were in USD and stupidly inflated (but all airports are). Kitty bought a vegetarian wrap, which turned out to be mushrooms and cream cheese, for USD $6...

We arrived in Bogotá and headed straight to a cambio where we got a very poor rate for our Soles. Luckily we´d organised a pickup from the airport and were greeted with a sign saying ¨Catherine Mortimer¨ so we jumped aboard and drove the considerable distance to Destino Nomada. We checked in and headed off straight away to get some food & check out the main plaza. Being a small hostel we met people quickly and had a few drinks in the courtyard.

Friday we spent four hours touring the Museo de Oro (Gold Museum) which houses a large amount of hostorical gold artifacts. Interestingly, the people knew how to guild their objects, which annoyed the Spanish when they found out that the objects were 95% Copper!

Plaza Bolivar

Golden shell of a shell...only the foil remains

Detailed duck type birds

Plaza next to Museo de Oro

Monkey earings

Fish & hook

Tiny figurine

Friday night we had a BBQ & caught up with an old friend of Kitty's, Germán, who is also a part owner of the hostel. We had a few drinks at the hostel, played card games then headed out to Zona Rosa for a few more. We ended up getting a beer tower between the three of us and crashed at Germáns place, given it was closer than the hostel.

Saturday morning we woke up to a nice breakfast soup cooked by Germáns mum, along with homemade hot chocolate. Apparently it's semi traditional to include cheese in the hot chocolate so Lawrie tried this, with mixed feelings! They would be good separately but a little weird together! We made it back to the hostel in time to watch the football and spent the afternoon relaxing and sleeping.

Sunday Lawrie's back was locking up again so we didn´t do too much, it was also raining so we headed off to the cinema to watch Pirates of the Caribbean, apt given that we would soon set foot on the Caribbean coast.

On Monday we travelled to an accupuncturist, waited 1.5hrs before been told that they couldn't see us. We went to a pharmacy to get some painkillers and muscle relaxants which were subsequently lost on the cab ride home! It was a very sore day (for Lawrie) and a waste of time for both of us! We checked out the Botero Museum, full of paintings & art by and owned by a famous Colombian artist, Fernando Botero.

View between galleries

Courtyard inside the museo

Crazy in metallic paint/ink

Everything of Boteros is fat

Tuesday we went up to Monserrate via the cable car to check out the view of the city. Bogotá is huge and sprawls all across the valley. The street naming system (calles one direction, carreras the other) is sequentially numbered making it easy to navigate.

View from the top of the cable car

Us at the top!

Lovely water feature near church

We joined a free walking tour around town and saw the historical area around Plaza Bolivar before checking out Quinta de Bolivar (Bolivars house) and the beautiful attached gardens. The garden had a maze of drainage channels and water features, fed from a spring at the rear of the property.