Villa Del Leyva

Day 1 – Zorro Town!

Being woken up very early again with our 7am coffee and juice we had quick showers and then packed as we were on our way again.  We were going to a town that was recommended to us as very pretty and a must see.

We went to a nearby café to get some breakfast then went back to our hostel where we had booked a taxi for 9am.  The taxi took us back to the bus station where we picked up our tickets for the bus to Tunja.

It was about a 3 ½ hour bus ride through the mountains before we arrived at Tunja, here we had to pick up a mini-bus to take us the rest of the way.  After a bit of confusion at the bus station as there were several companies you could go with, one guy was pretty anxious to get us on his mini-bus so we agreed to go with him.

The mini-bus ride was around ¾ hour, or would have been if it hadn’t of kept stopping to pick up more passengers and hawkers to sell food.  But finally, we arrived around 3pm and set off in search of the hostel we had booked.

Our first impressions of the town were really good, very much like Barichara with white-washed buildings and tiled roof.  Although after dragging our wheeled luggage down quite a few very cobbled streets our opinions had altered slightly.

We found our hostel down a quiet side road and checked in, the hostel was quite nice as the rooms were all located around a central courtyard.  Our room was clean but on the smallish side with no cupboards to store our clothes, we quickly unpacked as best we could and headed out.

First, we wandered around the cobbled streets admiring how pretty the town was before entering the main square.  The main square was completely cobbled with a small fountain at the centre, in fact this square was massive, apparently, the largest square in Columbia.  The town had recently been used for the setting of a South American TV series of Zorro, so I’ll have to don a black mask if we plan to do some horse riding here.

After taking some photos of the square, the church and the buildings surrounding the square we headed to a nearby restaurant bar where we had some afternoon ’welcome’ beers whilst watching people walk through the square.  It was all very relaxing until we asked for the bill and to my astonishment the drinks were double the price of anywhere else in Columbia

Expressing my unhappiness at this to the waitress we then left and went in search of a restaurant that looked good on trip advisor. After getting my directions wrong and heading in the opposite direction we eventually found it only to find that it was shut.

As it was still early to eat we decided to find a cheaper bar and try and find Shell’s elusive cigarette filters.  We found a cheaper bar to have a drink but there was still no luck on the filter front.

It was now early evening so we decided to go back to the restaurant to get dinner, but it was still shut.  However, we had noticed a parilla next door so we thought we would give that a try.  We had a very nice waiter who was very attentive and explained what the different meats were.  As it had been a while and we thought we deserved a treat we both went for a steak. 

The only problem being when I tried to ask the waiter for a rare steak I was convinced in Spanish it was ‘Hencho’ but he looked very confused/surprised no matter how I tried to pronounce it, I gave up.  But I was convinced I had the right word, however when Shell put it into her phone translator it came up as ‘Fuck’.  So basically I had been asking for a steak fuck, no wonder the poor lad was looking confused, cue 10 minutes of laughter from Shell!! (Still convinced in Spanish Spain its Hencho).

Once Shell had finished crying with laughter our food turned up and our steaks were not exactly fuck, they were pretty medium to well done.  But there were a couple of sauces with them, chimicurro and chile which helped them go down and in fact the steaks were OK.

We decided to have an early night and headed back across the square, just as we were exiting I caught the sound of some rock music coming out of the corner bar so we thought we would check it out.  The bar was very cosy, had reasonable priced beer and was playing music so we thought we would have a drink in there.

After one beer though the music was switch off and the TV put on to show a recent Columbia v Brazil under 19s football match from the night before.  As much as I like football I had caught most of this the night before in San Gil so we finished our drinks and headed home for an early night after all.

Day 2 – More Booking Frustration

We got up slightly later than normal and headed to the courtyard for breakfast.  After waiting for 15 minutes and no one paying attention to us we realised we had missed the breakfast cut off point.  We did manage to get them to wrestle up a couple of coffees for us though.

As we were a bit peckish we headed out and found a nearby café where we got some more coffee’s and a couple of pretty bland pastries.  Whilst we consumed these we formulated our plan of action for the next few days and as we had miscalculated a day we decided we would head off the next day to Bogota (as we would have had to spend another day it the town if we had wanted to go to the Saturday market).

With this in mind,  we then headed off to find a tourist office so we could book some outings for today, hopefully some horse riding. First, we tried the official tourist office, which was tiny and did not have a great deal of information, so they pointed us in the direction of a tourist agency.

 

At the first agency, we found that the cost for horse riding was quite expensive at about £17 hour each so we headed towards the bus station where I thought I had seen more agencies on the way in.  We tried another two agencies where again the horse riding was expensive, so we spoke to them about an afternoon sight seeing tour by car.  Again, we found this was overly expensive at about £50 not including entrance fees (I guess this town is just a tourist trap).

So we resigned ourselves to just to have a lazy afternoon and appreciate the beauty of the town. Before we headed back to the square we went to the bus station and picked up tickets for a mini-bus to Bogota for the next day.

It was now midday so we went back to the main square and decided to do what the locals do, buy a cheap beer from the shop and drink it sat on a bench.  We had picked up a stray dog on the way through to the square and it decided to curl up at our feet, which was soon joined by a couple more, in the hope of getting some food off the gringo’s.  Feeling relaxed and watching the locals walk by, we stayed there for an hour or so drinking a couple of cheap beers before returning to the hostel.

 

Back at the hostel we moved a bench from outside our room to a nearby settee and spent the rest of the afternoon blogging and doing some research on what we were up to the next few days.

Once the sun had gone down we headed once again to the square and to the rock bar from the previous night.  The music was quite eclectic but enjoyable so we spent the rest of the night there until our bellies started rumbling.

On our way back to the hostel, most of the restaurants seem to have shut for the night, but as luck would have it there was a burger joint right on the corner of the street that was still open.  Ordering a couple of dirty burgers I once again had a bit of communication problem as I couldn't work out if the burgers came with chips, which resulted in burger and chips with a side of chips each.  The burgers were a bit sloppy and we had too many chips, but it did help soak up the evenings excess’s.

After our grease-fest we then continued back to the hostel to put our heads down for the night, its back to a big bad city tomorrow.