A South American Sojourn

Villa de Leyva was lovely. It’s vast main square (14,000 m² – one of the largest in the Americas) was a great place to hang out, people watch and listen to the buskers – nice benches thoughtfully placed around the edge for resting and drinking beer 🙂

Villa de Leyva main Square

Villa de Leyva lookout.

Spent 4 days camped in the grounds of the very relaxing Hostel Renacer. Had a very sociable Christmas meeting people from all parts of the world. This hostel is a stop for overland trucks and other vehicles.

We met an American working on rehabilitating child soldiers and a French guy working on water conservation schemes in Bolivia – made a nice change from talking to spotty teenage backpackers.  🙂

4 days for two experienced cycle-tourists to cycle 160km! Easy…. Are we fit? NO! Are we altitude adjusted? NO! Was it easy? hahahahahahah……

The first 65km literally took us all day, with steep climbs, wrong turns and no oxygen. Cycling out of cities on nasty busy roads always sucks however, this was especially polluted, especially busy and especially sucky. Our campsite for the night though was anything but. Our WarmShowers ( CouchSurfing for cycle tourists ) host Daniel runs his own tiny campsite and gave us a beautiful free spot for the night; it was just a shame that we were rubbish guests and too exhausted to do anything but collapse in the tent and pass out.

Our plan was to take the back roads to Villa de Lleyva. That means no tarmac and STEEP gradients……. at altitude, with regular 2600 metres to 3000 metre climbs. The good part is that we get to see amazing views and Colombian rural life and hardly encounter any vehicles except for one notable exception.

Our second night camping was another beautiful site; a campground by a rock climbers hang out. The new tent is proving to be excellent.

The notable exception to being on quiet roads was finding ourselves climbing up a steep gravel road between two towns between which coal trucks, multiple, multiple coal trucks were ferrying their load. Nightmare. Wheezing like steam trains anyway on account of the altitude and sucking in lung falls of coal dust. We were shattered at the next village.

The next challenge was Steve waking up in the night with stomach related issues…..  The next morning the stomach and  Steve were worse. Faced with the choice of cycling sick on rough roads with big climbs or staying in a one horse town whose horse ran away, we decided to buy movement stopping drugs and cycle.

27 km later after 400+m of climbing and 800m of decent on a really diabolical road, we reached a village with taxis and more specifically, a taxi driver that agreed to put our bikes on his roof and drive us the last 20km to Villa de Leyva where steve crawled into the tent and tried not to die.

We’re now camped in the grounds of a lovely hostel where we plan to stay for the next few days with plans to head further north on Boxing Day.

And here’s a few more photos:

Went on a bicycle tour ( well, what did you expect? ) of the city with an excellent guide who gave us a broad overview of Colombian politics, history, art, architecture and culture combined with visits to fruit markets, coffee factories, street art spots and a game of Tejo that involves drinking beer whilst throwing heavy chunks of metal at a clay target that literally has explosives embedded in it. Points scored for hitting the target and explosions!

Tourist excursion up the mountain for spectacular night views of the city somewhat let down by an excess of very tacky illuminated festive/Christmas paraphernalia.

Excellent free visit to the Botero Art museum housing art by Dali, Miro, Picasso, Botero, Monet and Matisse to name but a few. Highly recommended if you make it to Bogota. Another excellent museum is the gold museum with a huge collection of pre-Columbian mainly gold artefacts. Astounding levels of craftsmanship and art, some of it produced more than a 1000 years ago.

We’ve also been busy researching our back country cycle tour of the Colombian highlands with the help of maps, local knowledge and google maps and street view. It is amazing what tiny dirt roads google seems to have got their car to drive along……… What a job.  A googled road…..

Knackered, shell-shocked and jet-lagged but here. Bikes in one piece. Everything that went on the plane came off it so all-in-all everything is currently hunky dory.

We considered cycling the 15km from the airport but couldn’t face it in the end….  Nice Taxi driver.

Initial impressions are- lots of street-art, friendly people and a big mountain right there overlooking the city with a cable car thingy and funicular railway going up to it.  We can see  it from our hostel window.