The rest of Colombia

The bus down to Bogota turned into a total mission, 20 hrs with the aircon on full blast (Why do they do this? everyone was freezing) and a horribly uncomfortable seat. At one point after 7hrs without a stop I was dying of thirst and did something kinda stupid; I had a few sips of water from the sink in the toilet, big mistake.

Arriving in Bogota everything was fine and I settled in for an afternoon nap (I love naps) only to wake up two hours later with a raging fever. I thought maybe I was just dehydrated so I downed a few glasses of water but then things became even more interesting, particularly in the digestive system.....

Three days and only two meals later I was starting to think that maybe I had dengue fever or something so I went down to the clinic and was put on a drip straight away. No dengue fortunately and after two big bags of saline I felt ten times better, probably could have saved 150 dollars just by drinking a bit more water..... The doctor prescribed 5 different drugs to take to get rid of the bugs but I thought I`d give it a day and see how I felt first.

That night was a party bus tour of Bogota stopping at three clubs along the way and after feeling great all afternoon I grabbed a seat, along with two other guys from Melbourne (there are Aussies everywhere in Colombia, possibly even the biggest nationality of backpackers there). Was an epic night, finishing up watching the sunrise from a club on the 30th floor of a building in town with a couple of hundred other backpackers and locals all getting down seriously hard. Bogota sure knows how to party!!!

The Plaza de Simon Bolivar near my hostel, I stayed in La candelaria, the old quarter.

Las candelaria has a great vibe, kinda alternative artsy with lots of bars and cafes

The next day after a good sleep in I walked down to the gold museum to check out the huge collection of pre-Colombian artefacts in what is amongst the greatest gold museums in the world.

So much gold.....

This guy was my favourite:

Not surprisingly they have some serious doors there

Bogota is a great city and definitely my favourite one so far in Latin America. Very well organised with modern transport, very clean (so nice to be somewhere clean again) and heaps to see and do. The people are really friendly too.

After Bogota I caught the bus down to Salento via Armenia to see some wax palms. I had seen some photos of the area and it looked spectactular, with 70/80 foot high palm trees poking out above the rainforest canopy and more dotted about the rolling hills of farmland surrounding the town. I arrived in Armenia too late to get to Salento that day so spent the night in a hotel and went over the next morning.

My plan was to get to town and walk around and over to the valley nearby where the wax palms supposedly were. I probably should have done some more research before I left because when I got to the town ( a very pretty little town nonetheless) I walked up the hill to see absolutely no wax palms for miles in every direction. I then found out that the valley was 11 km away and then you have to keep walking on from there to the palms, DOH!

The view was quite nice however and back in town I had some amazing and cheap local Coffee (this area is the main coffee producing region in Colombia, one of the biggest coffee exporters in the world) and a nice lunch and sat in the square in the sun with a good book waiting for the bus back to Armenia.

Salento

Next stop was Medellin for the weekend and some more partying. I stayed Casa Kiwi, a great hostel with a rooftop pool and a bar downstairs so the partying was not hard to come by and I had another great Saturday night of drinking, talking crap and dancing my dubious version of Salsa.

The road from Armenia to Medellin had some great views:


Medellin from the roof of the hostel


From Medellin to Cali next (absolutely nothing going on there....) and then from Cali down to the Ecuadorian border. In Cali I noticed a small pimple/bite thing on my foot and after dealing with it I thought that would be the end of the story. My foot was kind of aching a little bit but I got on the bus from Cali to the border anyway, little aches and pains usually sort themselves out pretty quick after all.

Just inside the Colombian side of the border I took a quick detour to check out the famous church on the river near Ipiales, very pretty:



Ha Ha, nice hats guys


And into Ecuador....