The Columbian Highlands

To get to Villa De Leyva at a decent hour of the day and avoid staying in Bogata again for the night required us to take an overnight bus. Never a comfortable option, but you save on accommodation costs and semi-sleep a boring journey away, so it’s usually worth it. After quite a restless night, we were then cursed with a total nutcase driver for the last leg of the journey from Bogota to Villa de Leyva who sped up around corners. Neither of us had experienced anything like it and now know not to sit over a wheel arch on a small bus. Lesson learnt.

Villa de Leyva was hot and dusty with unpaved roads and on first impressions appeared very laid back. We were dropped off at a little plaza. A few tourist places to rent bikes and organise hikes dotted the main street through the town, but there were also enough local looking places to eat that the place still had character and didn’t appear too pretentious. A couple of streets had a few too many overpriced artesian craft shops, but this has come to be standard now anywhere near any sort of popular tourist trail. And well, when it comes to it, there’s always an excuse to buy another wrist band!

Villa de Leyva and the biggest plaza in Columbia

We chose to go to one of the cheaper, traditional looking places for lunch. I opted for local dish ‘Mute con patas’. I’m lucky to have the luxury over Tim of being able to try most things, as a dish containing meat is not an issue. I now know though that I’ll limit myself to somewhere below the level of a hoof! Thinking it’ll be some gooey mash of corn and meat, as most things are, I was imaginably disappointed when this awful tasting soup was brought out with a fleshy, spongy thing in it that I can only describe as looking like the underneath of a horses’ hoof. I’ve since looked it up and it’s actually most likely to be a cow hoof. I couldn’t eat it and it was later to be the blame for my chronic stomach cramps. Cramps that I have now discovered are in fact a side effect of Malarone – the expensive anti-malarials I’m having to take due to my bad reaction to Doxycycline, the first ones I tried!

After lunch we headed to the other end of town to a recommended campsite and it was well worth the recommendation. It was beautiful. The staff were so smiley and friendly. They gave us a free beer for our efforts of hiking up to where they are based with our bags (they offer to pay for a taxi, but we thought we’d walk it as the weather was so nice). We set up tenty, who hadn’t been aired for a while and set to exploring the area.

A beautiful campsite - a bit like Dad's place in Bowlhead Green!

View of Villa de Leyva countryside

A hike up into the hills started conveniently just behind the campsite and we followed a map up to where certain viewpoints were marked. Unconvinced the views we were seeing were the ones on the map, we climbed higher than we needed to in order to try to find some apparent benches that we so far hadn’t come across. As light started to drop, as it does a lot quicker here in the tropics we decided to head back. It was quite a fun walk though and we worked up an appetite for the delights of a bar in town, who in true American gastronomic style, could knock up a mean ‘wrap’ or ‘wroll’ with your name on the side! The menu contained something in the region of about 40 different options resulting in Tim having about 4 different vegetarian options to choose from. A rare treat in his books! The waiter was really friendly and it was a fun night and good introduction to the town.

An awesome wrap

Another awesome wrap!

Later that night however, I started to suffer really bad stomach cramps. I hoped it wasn’t the wrap and could only put it down to the horrendous monstrosity of a lunch I had a few sips of earlier in the day. It made sleeping a bit painful and the next morning I really suffered with a particularly bad stomach. I took some painkillers though and waited for things to work their way through before we headed into town to get some bikes out.

It might sound like a bad idea, but it was a nice day and I didn’t want to ruin it with a bad tummy. I could always emergency stop if things got bad! We found a place where we could apparently hire bikes for 8 mill (about £2.40) with no time limit for return apart from later that day. Seeming a bargain, we set out with bikes and a map of the area.

We visited by some rocks in the same ilk as stone henge that were used back in the day for determining the seasons. This was achieved by determining the length of the shadows cast by the rocks. This would then inform the people which crops would probably work best. We had been planning on entering the area where the stones are, but it soon became apparent that you could save the cash and just take a photo from the outside. Besides, by the look of some of the stones, it seemed a big joke to me. A 3D sculpture of what some kids might just graffiti on a wall! 

Cock rock!

Next we visited the place where one of the Kronosaurus dinosaur fossils was discovered. The kronosaurus was a large carnivorous marine reptile and the fossil is on display in the museum. This time we paid the entrance fee and had a look around. It was really interesting and I can say I finally learnt and understood how fossils form – something I had previously been a bit unclear about.

Cool dinosaur fossil in the museum down the road. This dude was actually lived here over 130 million years ago!

Taking the back country roads took us past some really expensive looking Columbian houses in the hillsides. It was apparent there was a lot of money in the area. Finally, we turned back and stopped in on a series of little lakes hidden amongst the pine in an otherwise very desert like landscape. Unfortunately we couldn’t swim in the pools to cool down after the long uphill on the bikes, but soon enough I found some horses, so became distracted and very happy.

Picture postcard Columbian lakes

Adorable horses just tethered with no one about. I so wanted to steal one!

Then once again, the storm clouds started to gather above our heads. There is something to be said for rainy season it seems! 

Rainy season in all it's glory

We hurried back with the bikes, only to then be charged 3 times the amount we were expecting to pay. Apparently the amount quoted was per hour, not the day. We hoped he wasn’t deceiving us. To be honest he could have said hourly and we didn’t hear or understand. Either way, we made use of the ‘muggers wallet’ that Tim holds in his possession that contains very little, but still ‘some’ money that we can hand over if we get confronted by someone. This made it very easy to play the card, ‘we haven’t got that much money’, and resulted in us managing to give ourselves a 25% discount. So still, a very good deal for half a day’s bike rental.

My stomach had managed to hold fire that day and even into the evening I was fine. We grabbed a beer in the overpriced touristic town plaza in the last of the evening light. We then headed up the road to a bar near our campsite for a beer for a third of the price in a much more genuine setting – a double bonus in our books. 

Overpriced beer in the sunshine

That night we attempted the staple, super cheap, super tasty quinoa and veg meal made with our last dwindling bag of quinoa, this time adding some fresh Columbian red beans for variety. Unfortunately we didn’t realise the beans needing soaking first and after 30 minutes of simmering had to fish each one out individually taking care to brush off any attached quinoa. This left us with about 5 heaped table spoons of the mixture each for dinner. We managed to rescue the beans by boiling them for another 3 hours and eating them for lunch the next day. Totally not worth the effort though. From now on, cans of beans it is.

The next day we rose early for a 7am bus departure to Iguaque National Park where we were planning to do a day hike which consisted of a 3 hour ascent up to a lagoon and about 2 hours down. Although my stomach was once again playing up, I made it through the bumpy 45 minute drive up to the park. At £15, it was quite an unusually expensive entry fee and to be honest it was a bit of a shit hike. 

The massive amount of jungle at the start was not really our cup of tea. It wasn’t really thick jungle, but it was enough to obscure any views of the surrounding countryside. There was very little in the way of animals or birds. I saw one hummingbird and a brown bird and a bug bit me, somehow managing to get under my t-shirt on my back whilst I was wearing a rucksack. It was also a really steep climb along very narrow paths at times, not leaving much room for arm swinging bug defence. 

A beautiful start to a horrendous jungle trek! If only we stayed in this spot.

Apparently, the difference in altitude resulted in a diversity not seen in many other places. Occasionally there would be a sign introducing this new layer of jungle. But to us it all just looked like green viney buggy jungle. The difference did however come about half way up, where the jungle opened up to a more rocky landscape, where little else grew apart from different shrubs and grasses and I have to say, awesome little trees called Frailejones that only grow between 1-3cm a year, making even the smallest of these cute little trees with pineapple looking heads, in fact very old. 

Finally out of the jungle!

In the end we got to the lagoon and is was really pants! Tim murmured the sounds of ‘oh no, I think we’ve found it’ as we rounded the corner of the last hill. Such a climb for all that! Still, we made do and marked the occasion by sitting down to enjoy yesterday evening’s beans we had brought with us.

Shit lagoon face

We made it down really quickly, not wanting to spend any more time in the jungle than we needed to and our super speedy decent ensured we got down just before the storm clouds gathered once again. In fact, we found a great place to view the storm from at the bottom whilst we waited for our bus back. It was a little shop on the corner where the bus stopped but it had a few benches outside but protected by the rain in what can only be described as a small farm courtyard. There were a few men drinking a beer, some school kids and a mum and kid waiting for the bus too. The torrential rain had bought all the chickens scuttling in to take cover and a mother hen found a suitable spot from which she called for her little chicks to come and find her. They initially looked panicked, cheeping frantically, not knowing where their mum was but soon found her and snuggled in under her chest, safe from the storm until they were all obscured from view. A few other chickens waddled around looking drenched. The storm was now in full swing and thundering right above our heads. 

Scared chick-a-dees

Look at the drumsticks on this one. She looked good enough to eat!

We also grabbed a beer and shared a bag of crisps, trying to avoid the stares of the slightly odd looking 5 year old kid on the bench next to us. Turns out the kid was probably looking a bit odd because he was in fact ill and in a split second of turning away from us, projectile vomited all over the floor in front of us. Just as quickly as we reacted by pulling our feet up onto the bench, one of the soggy farmyard dogs was on the sick, lapping it all up in front of everyone. The smell was pretty bad and we were immensely happy when the bus turned up early. We jumped on the bus and made sure we got a seat behind, rather than in front of sick kid.

That evening we returned to the wrap place as I was now sure malarone was the culprit for my bad stomach rather than any food I had eaten. We had another tasty meal and coincidently we were found by old mates Colin and Polly who we had met in Salento. We spent the evening with them, having a few drinks in a few different bars in town. Drink managed to temper my stomach cramps for a while, but I began to really suffer again later that night, eventually passing out in the tent, partly though drink, partly through the pain. I was just hoping that whatever this crazy reaction was, within time, my body would learn to deal with it. It had until tomorrow as tomorrow was time to leave Villa de Leyva and head for the beautifully named Valley of the Sun!