Villa de Leyva

A small colonial town outside of Bogotá, Villa de Leyva is known for its quaint architecture and for having one of the largest town squares in South America.

Also, as our knees remind us, cobblestones....cobblestones everywhere.  We had originally planned to stay a few days here and then travel further north, but we ran out of time and motivation.  After a fews weeks of not having stayed longer than two full days in a place, we were ready to plant.  As a result, our time time in Villa de Leyva was marked by leisurely outings, great hikes and lots of relaxation.

Our hostel was more a mix between homestay and hotel.  We splurged on a room with a private bath and balcony (22 USD a night!) and this is the view it afforded us:

This is the man-turkey and his harem that kept us company for almost all our meals:

Our first day there we didn't do much - we wasted a lot of time at an online recruitment fair for jobs and then wandered around the town in the afternoon.

While we were there, a film festival came into town and gussied up the town square.

If shopping isn't your cup of tea, there aren't many tourist attractions in Villa de Leyva, so on the second day, we took a walk outside the city to two sites, el Fósil and el Infiernito.  Villa de Leyva was at one point entirely underwater, and at another point, a stronghold of the Muiscas, one of the larger indigenous groups before colonization.  El Fósil, exactly what it sounds like, a large fossilized skeleton of a kronsaurus, is a reminder to the region's prehistoric heritage.

A Muisca site of astrology, worship, and burial, El Infiernito, or the little hell, got its lovely name from the Spanish, who were appalled not only by the overall function of the site, but also by it's very vivid, very scandalous sculptures.

Muiscas were a predominantly agricultural society and so much of their mythology is related to planting and harvesting.  According to Muisca mythology, the earth is female while the sun, and the act of cultivation, is male.  Our memory gets pretty rocky around here, but we're pretty sure that at certain times during the year, the statues were knocked over or buried in the earth - almost literally depicting the sowing of seeds in the ground.

The other interesting piece of archeology at the site is the calendar the Muiscas created to mark the passage of the equinoxes and solstices.  The two lines of pillars cast shadows that, for the majority of the year, do not line up or touch.  However, on the solstices, the shadow cast by the first pillar of the first column aligns perfectly with the last pillar on the second column.  On the equinoxes, each pillar casts a shadow on the pillar immediately next to it.  The shadows are believed to have aided in the planning of planting and harvesting.

The third day was a wash, literally.  We were rained on for a full 12 hours. which provided an incredible excuse for laying in bed and reading all day.  Before the rains came, we had a chance to visit an early morning market, where we were awed by the sheer volume of food.

  
We decided to have breakfast there, and after getting a tour of all the soups offered, decided on two - a fish stew and one that appeared to be mostly comprised of cow (?) organs (?).  This is a pretty good example of why we have been sick the last few weeks.

Fourth day we caught an early morning bus to a neighboring town, Santa Sofia (the bus driver coincidentally turned out to be the same man who gave us a taxi ride to our hostel the first night.  We ended up seeing him the next morning as well, on our way to another hike. Villa de Leyva is a very small town).  We were traveling to Santa Sofia, to do a hike called "The Angel Step" - an old Muisca road that travels the ridge of a mountain/hill.  It's bordered on both sides by pretty steep cliffs leading into two different rivers.  The hike is such a touristy thing to do that the women on the bus immediately began speaking to us about it, without even asking us why we were traveling to St. Sofia.  Amongst other things, they warned us of the danger of the hike and how scary it is (one woman who went said she couldn't do it because she was too afraid).  To get to the Angel Step, you must first walk about 4 km from the town square.  The aforementioned bus driver picked us up about five minutes into our walk and carried us about a kilometer down the road to a gas station.  From there we took a windy deserted road to the trail head (which was really just a confusing sign that told us in one direction we would find the trail and in other we would find dangerous guard dogs - though it neglected which direction would lead to which).  Once we found the trail, we enjoyed beautiful vistas of the neighboring mountains and rivers.

Here's a picture of the angel step - not the most daring moment of the trip (see soup above for example), but worth it nonetheless.

 We had the trail to ourselves ...and one giant snake that quickly put an end to our hike and had us heading back to Villa de Leyva.

Our last day in Villa de Leyva we were lucky enough to get to hike to Iguaque, a lagoon on a mountain top that, according to Muisca mythology, is the birthplace of humanity.  The hike began in dense jungle and, after a climb of about 4,500 feet (at our highest point, I think we were at around 11,500 feet) ended in a ecosystem called "Páramo."

Beginning

Middle

End

As we understand it, the Páramo refers to high altitude ecosystem most often found in mountain ranges in Central and South america. For us, the most spectacular part of the Páramo were the incredible new plants:

This hike was definitely one of the highlights on our trip.  We left early the next morning for Bogota, enduring yet another truly terrible bus ride.  We had about 12 hours in the city before hoping on an early bus to Medellin the next day.  And so wraps up our brief tour of middle-Colombia.

Bogotá

Bogotá is immense, close to 9 million people. We didn't have expectations for the city going into it and, having spent 4(ish) days there, we still don't feel that we have any real sense of it.  We stayed in Candelaria, which is the tourist epicenter where hostels account for probably a fourth of the buildings.  That being said, it's a really beautiful part of town -  colonial architecture, brightly painted buildings and incredible street art.

The first day we were there, we both were dealing with a stomach bug (probably the result of our saddest mall meal ever) so we stayed pretty close to the hostel.  Luckily for us the hostel was walking distance from Plaza Bolivar and the Botero museum, so despite not being terribly enthusiastic about exploring, we saw quite a bit.

Feeling much better on the second day we headed to Monserrate, a colonial church overlooking the city.  See that tiny spec on the hill, that's the church from a distance:

We had originally planned on hiking up the mountain. However, the trail is closed every Tuesday for maintenance (our travels are filled with so many examples of this type of stellar planning), so we had to take a train up instead.  The train ride there, which couldn't have been more than five minutes long, ferried us up to over 10,000 feet.  We stepped off and immediately felt the impact of altitude (I'm pretty sure I was winded just taking my camera out of the bag).

We got there early so there weren't too many people and we were able to get some incredibly beautiful and uninterrupted views of the city and the church.  We grabbed an obligatory cup of coca tea (for the altitude) and wandered around, continually awed by the sprawling expanse before us.

Heading back down to a reasonable altitude we grabbed lunch and then hurried over to the gold museum to avoid the afternoon rain (jokes on us though, the rain started about five seconds into our walk back home).  We've been hearing about the gold museum since before we arrived in Colombia and it lived up to its hype - so much so that we actually went there twice, returning on our way back to Medellín and getting an audio tour.  There are two main floors, so it wasn't overwhelmingly large, but we were amazed by the sheer volume of artifacts, the intricate details of the pieces, and the artful displays.  There were probably about 200 or so pictures taken and about three that didn't turn out blurry, so here you go:

Our last (half) day in Bogotá we walked a surprisingly long way to get to the National Museum, which probably would have been great had we not been hungry (turns out we're actually three year olds), so we walked through quickly and then basically sprinted back to our neighborhood to get lunch - quinoa soup and veggie lasagna that turned out the be one of the best meals of our trip.  From there we caught the worst bus ride of our lives (two hours to leave Bogota due to traffic, some really epic Spanish power ballads, and some really terrifying night driving) to Villa de Leyva, a small colonial pueblo that should be about 3.5 - 4 hours away from Bogotá but took us more like six hours to get to.      

Coffee Region continued...

At this point, we're comically behind on the blog.  "How behind?" you might ask  Well, we are writing from our roof top in Medellín after returning from our travels last night.  So, pretty behind.  After Salento, we stayed a few more days in the coffee growing region visiting Filandia, Quimbaya, and Manizales.  Just a warning - the next few entries may read a bit funny because some pieces of them were written as we were traveling, and others after we had already moved on.

Filandia was one of the highlights of our trip.  We stayed outside the city in a small hostel where we were the only guests - it was definitely more like a room mate situation, which was only occasionally uncomfortable :)  Our hostel:

Our resident sheep:

Upon arrival, we were greeted with cups of coffee and a brief "tour" of the coffee plants (there were probably six in total?) in the backyard.

During the tour we got a bit of background on coffee farming and some of the predominant cultivation practices in Colombia.  There seems to be a pretty strong division between the younger, more educated producers who are vying for the organic artisanal market, and older campesinos who are part of a larger coffee cooperative (monopoly?) owned by Juan Valdez.  It's something we still want to learn more about, but our motivation to do much research has been trumped by the necessity of last minute travel plans and terrible internet connections.  After our tour and getting settled in we took a short hike to some waterfalls.

They would have been the perfect place for a swim had a heavy rain storm not descended on us right as we arrived.  Incidentally, the rainy season is still very much happening.  

The next day, we hiked from Filandia to another small town, Quimbaya, about 15 km. away.  For the first 30 minutes or so, this little guy was our companion.

The road there was incredible.  As we walked we passed through coffee and banana farms, small communities, and several different micro-climates (we started at a fairly high altitude and then descended).  

Coffee plants with banana trees providing shade.  There are two main coffee harvests during the year, but bananas can be harvested year round so provide a much more sustainable source of income.

We saw many of these signs as we walked through coffee fields.  Most advertised public works projects. Note the Juan Valdez logo in the top right

The view as we neared Qimbaya

We both felt the pace of the hike afforded us an opportunity to glimpse life in this area that we would have missed traveling by any other mode.  The wide variety of homes, schools, and farms all added nuance to our still very incomplete understanding of the region.

As we were leaving Filandia, our luck, which had been pretty solid up to that point, started to change.  Because the hostel is outside the city, the only way to get back in is walk (1 hour) or take a taxi-jeep.  However, the taxi-jeeps don't exactly run on a schedule and there's not a great way to predict when the next one is headed your way.  We were advised to just start walking up the road, the understanding being that even if a jeep didn't come someone would probably pick us up.  Wrong.  We hiked for a solid hour, uphill, carrying all of our things and didn't see a single car!  Once on the main road our prospects improved and we were finally able to flag down a jeep that took us to the main square where Matt, for the first time in his life, was stung by a bee while we tried to enjoy an overlook of the city.

Two bus rides and a taxi later, we found ourselves in Manizales, a city we had high hopes for.  We planned to base ourselves out of the city for about five days, but after a series of disappointments (mostly related to everything we wanted to do being closed and/or prohibitively expensive), we shortened our trip to one full day, more or less fleeing to Bogota as soon as possible.

While Manizales fell way short of our expectations, we managed to have a pretty "fun" time at Recinto Pensamiento - a "nature park" a bit outside of the city.   We needed an excuse to get outside our hostel and the park provided just that.

Matt, pre-walk, ready for adventure

The park, we learned, is not suitable for individual wandering, instead you must join a two(ish) hour tour that takes you through all the highlights - the herb garden, humming bird sanctuary, Japanese garden, and orchid trail.  In retrospect, it's probably good we had a guide, because left to our own devises we probably would have walked through it in about thirty minutes.  Hands down the best/strangest part was the Japanese garden.

 I can't tell you how surreal it is to see this view on one side:

and cherry trees and bonsais on the other:

This is our guide (who was maybe 20?) explaining about the bonsai trees and yes, that is a palm bonsai and a bougainvillea bonsai.  Did you notice the rain clouds in the background?  We got rained on here too.  

Highlight number two, the unexplained presence of an ostrich hanging out with the sheep.  

What is that ostrich doing there? We never got a satisfactory answer.  Arriving back in Manizales, we had the saddest meal of our entire trip at a food court in a mall near our hostel where we were treated to christmas decorations and children screaming.  

After a day, we were so so happy to leave, even if that meant spending 10 hours on a bus to Bogota. (Which, spoiler alert, it did.)