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The border crossing between Ecuador and Columbia passed without any problems, except silly queuing systems! and we we´re quickly transferred into a taxi and then onto a bus! The journey that followed was long, mountainous and by the end very tedious! I was still not feeling well, and felt progressively worse with every mountain road that we passed over!! We eventually arrived in Popayan, our overnight stop and went straight to bed in a very strange room which was huge but very bare, with only a tiny double bed, a garden bench and a desk with no chair!!
The following day, feeling a little bit better, we decided to head straight to San Augustin. The very journey was beautiful, firstly driving round what was apparently a volcano, but we only saw clouds!, rolling hills followed by a bumpy ride over mud tracks surrounded by cloud forest. We we the object of fascination for a couple of Columbian boys who initially decided to just turn round and stare at us, which would have become a bit wearing if it had lasted the whole journey! But... they then decided that we would be good for them to practice their English on, which was really sweet and quite funny as we could hear them practicing in front of us before getting the courage to turn round and talk to us! This was our first experience of Columbian people and how friendly everyone is as the people sat next to us quickly joined in chatting to us and pointing out different sights on the journey!
We arrived just outside San Augustin and were transferred into a car for the last few km. The driver was Jorge who works in the tourist information shop and he was really friendly and helpful, quickly working out how much Spanish we could speak and talking to that level so we could understand him! He did speak English but decided that it was better for us to practice Spanish than him English! We ended up renting accommodation from Jorge, which included a morning delivery of Columbian coffee each day. Surprisingly we both found out that we do actually like coffee now!
The following day we spent at the archeological park where there is a huge collection of statues from burials of local indigenous people from around 500-0BC. The group living there had disappeared by the time the Spanish arrived, and no one really knows why. We had another example of lovely Columbian people in the evening when a man saw us wondering around in search of a restaurant and stopped what he was doing to show us to a nice restaurant and have a drink with us! We felt really bad afterwards as we were a bit too English and untrusting and had both been wondering why he was helping us!
We went on a horse riding trip the following day to see more of these statues. The horses were much more active than those we had ridden in Baños and so it was a bit more scary for me! Particularly when, at the beginning, by horse decided that he didn't like two other horses who came from a different farm and gave them both a nip, one on the neck and the other on the bum! We went to see several sites of the burial stones and the ride in between was great fun. We even cantered down a road- this was a bit much for me and WIll said my face was a bit of a picture as I tried to slow the horse down!! The second half of the day was even more scary for me! Arriving at one of the sites, Will´s horse slipped in the huge amount of mud and fell over, Will suddenly found himself standing on the ground with the horse lying on the floor underneath him. Without seeming to be worried at all Will just step over the horse and moved away and then helped him up. But by this point I was terrified, and spent the next hour or so slightly freaking out about the mud, especially when my horse slipped a couple of times! I did manage to get my confidence back before the end when the mud ended and we could just have a nice walk in the sun! I did feel a little bit silly when a 10 year old boy came to collect all of the horses and just jumped from a high pathway straight onto a walking away horse and trotted off with another couple of horses in tow!
The next day we headed off again to the desert between San Augustin and Bogota. We felt a bit annoyed by the time we got to the desert, following a moto taxi driver charging a huge amount for the taxi journey in and then dropping us off only at the place he obviously worked for and not giving us any other options! The desert was really interesting scenery with red rocks jutting out the ground making a labyrinth. The highlight of the trip was the star gazing observatory in the evening. After a talk in Spanish, which I was quite pleased with how much I understood!, we looked through two different telescopes. The first showed amazing clear images of the moon and its craters, and the second showed an image of Saturn where you could actually see its rings! At the observatory they were selling a range of cactus products, so we tried a glass of wine and some crystallised sweets- very strange!
After only one night in the desert we headed north again to Bogota. We arrived late in the evening, after about two hours driving through the huge and very congested suburbs of Bogota. We we're going to stay with Matt in Bogota as he had an apartment and so we headed to the taxi with the address. The taxi driver said that the address was wrong and didn't exist! After a bit on convincing we managed to convince him just to take us to somewhere near this place and we´d find it ourselves! He managed to pull up directly outside the building, although we did´t know this at the time! Just as we pulled up a girl walked passed outside and looked into the taxi and we could see her mouthing the word Matt through the window! It turned out that very luckily Adrianna, Matt´s girlfriend, happened to be arriving at the flat at exactly the same time we pulled up. I´m not sure how we would have found it otherwise!!
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