Having consumed our weight in food and alcohol at the Andres Carne de Res restaurant, we felt the need to walk off the richness from the night before. Our first stop was the Museum of Gold in the centre of town. Normally I wouldn’t be interested in such a place but we had read it was meant to be good and given it was a Sunday it was free to get in.
Surprisingly it was really interesting and as far as museums go in South America it was well laid out and really informative - did you know that there are 84 indigenous groups in Colombia who speak 65 native languages? no? neither did I...
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| GOLD! |
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| Is this not Buddy Pine a.k.a Syndrome from the Pixar film The Incredibles?! |
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| Museum of Gold! |
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| Bamboo car that was outside the museum! |
Next up was the Fernando Botero art gallery. Botero was a Colombian born figurative painter and sculptor whose works depict women, men and life in general all with exaggerated and disproportionate volume. Once again we had lucked out with the gallery being free to get in and you were even allowed to take pictures of the art works, albeit without flash. Needless to say I went a little trigger happy papping at the art work. There is something quite intriguing about his paintings that I couldn’t resist capturing.
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| Botero´s version of Ms Mona Lisa |
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| Does my bum look big in this? |
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| Gimme five! |
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| Big bird |
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| The courtyard of the gallery |
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| This pic made me smile |
Our final visit during our time in Bogotá was the Montserrat Monastery which can be found on a hilltop overlooking the city. To get there you catch a funicular train up and normally a cable car down but unfortunately for us the cable cars weren’t running until 2pm and seeing as we had been super keen and got up early that morning we didn’t get to ride them down.
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| Funicular train |
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| View of Bogotá from the top - its HUGE! |
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| Hoof water bottle anyone? |
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| The monastery |
Bogotá is a funny city, I wasn’t expecting to like it all that much given that many people I know who had been hadn’t taken to it due to its ugliness, but actually we had a great time and I think we did manage to unearth the nicer parts of the city, especially the cool graffiti:
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| How cool is this? its graffiti advertising the release of the film Drive! |
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| This is my favourite |
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| Foxy |
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| Bogotán Banksy? |
Our next stop was Manizales which is known as the coffee region of Colombia. We stayed at an active coffee plantation called Hacienda Venezia just on the outskirts and off the beaten track – literally as our taxi driver didn’t even know where it was and ended up doing lots of illegal car manoeuvres including reversing on a dual carriage way to eventually find it! We finally arrived there at 3:30am in the morning after the most arduous bus journey to date. This one truly beat all the other bus journeys hands down in terms of lack of comfort and incidents. Upon boarding the mini bus (no big bus apparently on this route) my seat turned out to be directly behind the drivers chair screen above the wheel arch so my legs were unable to stretch themselves out and my face was pretty much touching my knees the entire journey. It was probably just as well it was me sat there as anyone taller than 5ft 5" (on a good day minus heels) would have seriously have had issues. Lack of leg room aside, the real delay on our journey was the fatality that occurred on the road we were travelling on. Basically a local Colombian had tried to cross the road and was hit by a huge truck (think the American kind) and was killed instantly. In the UK I imagine the ambulance services would arrive and move the body so that the road could be cleared by the police. However in Colombia there is a special police force which has to show up at the scene of the incident before any bodies or cars can be removed. This meant that neither our mini bus nor any of the other vehicles on the road went anywhere for almost two hours whilst the police made their way from the nearest big town. Not great when you have already had a long journey and can see a dead body minus any blanket to cover it from the bus window. There were so many locals (including some passengers from our bus) that were gawping at the body which we all just found really distasteful.
After such a long and eventful journey we all slept like babies. The next day we awoke to the most stunning views from our bedroom. The building had originally been a plantation and had recently been converted into a hacienda for travellers like us to stay there. It was all very colonial and the setting reminded me of Cuba. Each bedroom had names of famous coffee plantations around the world, ours was called Blue Mountain Jamaica. We were given a tour of the plantation and shown how the coffee beans were picked (they are green to start with and when they turn red then they are picked), shelled and then dried and roasted. It is only then that the beans change colour to brown as per our usual perception of the colour of coffee. We found out that Brazil currently produces the most amount of coffee in the world - mostly picked by machine. This is followed closely by Vietnam of all places where lots of cheaper coffee is grown to be mixed in with other types. Colombia then comes third with all of its coffee being 100% Colombian and not mixed with any other beans. Coffee beans in Colombia are pretty much all picked by hand due to the terrain of the country being so hilly it prevents machines from being used effectively. Not being the biggest coffee drinker, I personally found the free coffee we were given way too strong for my liking but I was assured by fellow travellers that it was the tastiest they had drunk.
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| A Coffee sack framed. I bought one to do the same and then about ten other people on the tour followed my lead! |
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| Free caffeine hit |
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| Hacienda Venezia |
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| The pool : D |
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| The plantation. Spot the coffee bean pickers... |
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| Pink pineapple! Who knew they grew in a bush?! |
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| No these aren't grapes, they're ripe coffee beans! |
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| Spot the English rose amongst the coffee plants : D |
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| Old school coffee bean shelling machine |
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| Where they store the beans before drying them |
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| The machine that roasts the beans |
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| Sacks of pre-roasted beans - they go brown after roasting |
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| Our ride from the plantation to Manizales the next day! |
Amusingly our tour guide at the plantation, Alex, asked whether we had visited Cartagena (a town on the Caribbean coast of Colombia with hot tropical weather) to which we all replied not yet. He said he could tell as I was still so white and had obviously not seen the sun since I had been in Colombia! Embarrassingly I had to admit that I had in fact been travelling around South America since December last year and that I just don't really tan (with the exception of freckles) and that actually for me I was quite brown! I didn't bother telling him that my mother is Spanish and just goes black looking at the sun as that would have just made him laugh even harder...
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