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.