Villa de Leyva & The Salt Cathedral - Week 47

8th to 10th August


After about half an hours sleep each on the overnight bus from Armenia to Bogota, we arrived bleary eyed at 5am and managed to get the next bus out to Tunja almost immediately and then another bus to Villa de Leyva. Didn't notice much of the journey as we were so tired. We arrived in Villa de Leyva at about 11am and checked into a pricey but lovely hostel in a colonial house with gorgeous patios and lovely bright rooms (oooh, sound like a travel agent!).

The main plaza, a mighty big one too!

Typical colonial architecture

Sleepy little town, but the rozzas still have machine guns

James braving the tradtional eggs in cheesy milk breakfast

One of many beautiful little colonial courtyards

A local registry office wedding with marching band

Locals getting the beers in on a Wednesday afternoon

Villa de Leyva is a quiet little town with cobbled streets to wander around and lots of lovely colonial architecture. The main problem was that because the day before had been a national holiday, people were apparently still recovering and no churches or museums were open for us.

We left Villa de Leyva early the next morning for the four bus extravaganza to get to Zipaquira and the famous Salt Cathedral:

The Salt Catherdral was built in the old salt mine after they had excavated all the avaliable salt. It was only finished in 1998 after the orignal cathedral built in the 1950´s became unsafe. The new one was designed by an architect from Bogota and so is very modern, with each chamber styled differently representing the journey of Jesus to the cross. The Cathedral has a service every Sunday and concerts with apparently superb acoustics.



After the Salt Cathedral, we got the bus to Bogota and finally found a decent hostel (Hostel Sue)! We went straight out into the city and ordered Katie a lovely emerald ring (but made the mistake of doing the whole transaction in Spanish, see later for details). Having paid a hefty deposit, we went to the supermarket to buy wine for a cheap celebration but got back to the hostel, started chatting to people, one thing lead to another and a bottle of wine, 6 beers and several shots of sambuca later we were on the dancefloor of a crazy club.

The next day was a bit of a write-off. We managed to leave the hostel at about 4pm to go and collect the ring but it wasn't what we had asked for in the slightest so we managed to get our deposit back but were really disappointed. The day went from bad to worse when we were both entirely incompetent trying to get public transport to the airport in rush hour. We did actually manage to get to the airport with an hour to spare but STILL MISSED OUR FLIGHT!!!! Un-bloody-believable! You really would think that we'd be better at this travel malarkey after 11 months!

Sooooo, 12 hours and an uncomfortable night 'sleeping' in the airport, we were on the next plane and finally made it to Quito.

Books we read:

Doctor Fischer of Geneva or The Bomb Party by Graham Greene

Animal Farm by George Orwell