It was slightly surreal seeing Matt after so long, and on the other side of the world! Our first evening was spent cooking dinner, discovering that Matt´s kitchen surfaces had electrical currents running through them and that you had to wear rubber shoes in the kitchen, followed by drinking tequila at a local bar, catching up and getting to know Adriana and Naty (Matt´s flatmate). Will then insisted that it would be a good idea to stay up until the grand prix in the morning, which he watched parts of on Naty´s laptop!

After another doctors visit the following day, and another load of antibiotics for me, we spent the next week or so exploring Bogota. We visited the impressive gold museum on afternoon, explored the old town area, went to the cinema to see Harry Potter, and saw the build up and aftermath of the Independence Day Parades- although we missed the actual police and army parades! The traffic was carnage for a couple of days with army across all the streets and tanks driving about! After the parades were over the streets felt really dodgy for that evening as all the police presence was gone and there seemed to be dodgy people hanging around!! The highlights of Bogota including Tayo, a popular local game that consists of through big metal weights at a clay board which has small packets of dynamite wedged in it. A successful shot, which we didn't have that many, meant that the dynamite exploded really loudly! We were on a tiny court compared to all the locals who were throwing really heavy weights across the width of a warehouse! It was proper dodgy as they changed ends between sets and sometimes were throwing towards people in the next court with no divisions or safety features! And, probably the most dodgy part of it was that the game itself was free and the only payment was buying a crate of beer from the bar! This was followed by attending a salsa lesson, very surprising as Will had previously stated that he wouldn't do this under any conditions! However, Adriana was the teacher and therefore he had no choice!

One day we managed to transport ourselves, with Matt, out of the city to a really lovely little town to visit a Salt Cathedral. The cathedral is constructed out of the older parts of a still running salt mine. You enter the mine on a tour and go down into the really impressive Cathedral, used mainly for tourism purposes. The architecture was amazing with massive columns, a huge cross, and a still salt waterfall. The pictures really don´t do it justice.

We travelled with Matt 8 hours north to San Gil, the adventure sports capital of Columbia. It is a lovely small town with a beautiful central plaza and lots of old buildings. The highlight of our time here was paragliding over a canyon and the Chicha Mocha river! It was an amazing experience and much less scary than I thought it would be. Flying round high above amazing scenery was a real experience! And even the landings were pretty soft! We spent a couple of days walking to waterfalls and natural swimming holes, climbing down a river over rocks and through waterfalls! We would have loved to spend some more time here but had to keep moving up to the north coast as we plan to meet Beastie in September and there are so many amazing places to see in Columbia! We left Matt in San Gil, ready to head back to Bogota, and took a night bus to the north Caribbean coast for some sunshine and diving!!