Pushing Pesos: The coldest place in Colombia BOGOTA

So we land in Bogota and considering we have pretty much spent 5 weeks sweating in Brazil and Leticia we are hit by the cold of Bogota. Never happy we now complain it's too cold, we had to get the jumpers and the shoes back out after being dumped at the bottom of our backpacks. We stayed in an area called Calendaria which is quite a cool area in Bogota. A lot of old buildings and colourful painted walls with impressive graffiti. We stay in a chilled hostel called Hostal Sue and spent the 3 days we had sight seeing before we headed to the next Colombian City of Medellin.

Having read up about an underground Catherdral on the out skirts of Bogota we used the public transport to get there. Bogota is run by a very efficient interlinked bus system. We had to get a small little bus to a town called Zipaquirá and from there we walked to the Salt Cathedral and did a tour. This tour was considerably more organised than our other mine tour in Bolivia, no near death experiences here. We were guided around the Cathedral which was very impressive. They used lights to highlight the well made sculptures. In honesty the guide was in Spanish only so we spent most of the time goofying around taking funny pictures. We later googled the Catherdeal and found out that 'The Salt Cathedral of Zipaquirá is an underground Roman Catholic church built within the tunnels of a salt mine 200 meters underground in a Halite mountain near the town of Zipaquirá, in Cundinamarca, Colombia. It is a very popular tourist destination and place of pilgrimage in the country. The name "Salt Cathedral" is mostly to attract tourists - while a functioning church that receives as many as 3,000 visitors on Sundays, it has no bishop and therefore no official status as a cathedral in Catholicism. The temple at the bottom has three sections, representing the birth, life, and death of Jesus. The icons, ornaments and architectural details are hand carved in the halite rock. Some marble sculptures are included. The Salt Cathedral is considered one of the most notable achievements of Colombian architecture.' Here are some pictures...

Me and Michael next to a station of the cross

The next day we walked around Bogota city centre which is quite built up and I would not say it was the prettiest city but it was nice. We also visited the Gold museum as we had heard it was incredible, plus it was only around $1.00 to get in. Admittedly, or rather ashamedly this was actually the first museum we had visited in our entire trip. It was infact a brilliant museum and we took our time reading every fact. The artifacts in the museum where very good, they had so much for people to see. It was well thought out and you left having more understanding of the sheer impact gold had on the history of Colombia. The museum told us that in the past metal and gold workers were actually treated like gods as they could mould the gold. That the jewellery made out of gold at the time represented a lot of mythical and symbolical creatures such as a frog for fertility etc. There was so much information that it hard to condense it in this blog, maybe we can meet up and I can tell you over 4 coffees haha. No, but seriously it was very educational and we were able to put the information we learnt in context when we visited Lost City ruins in Cuidad Peridad.

Next stop Medellin