June 14, 2018 – June 15, 2018
Zipaquira is famous for a church that has been carved out of an old salt mine. Its well reviewed and it seemed like a cool thing to go and see. We paid our admission, got our audio guides, and headed underground.
June 12, 2018 – June 14, 2018
Villa de Leyva is a beautiful colonial town near to the city of Bogota. Its 400 plus year old streets are lined with tourist shops selling ponchos and leather bags. There are lots of restaurants to chose from, and it has the largest plaza in Colombia (14,000 square metres). We loved it.
June 8, 2018 – June 12, 2018
We needed to fill our propane tank, and we had seen on iOverlander (we seriously use this app daily) that there were two places in the town of San Gil that other travellers had had good luck with getting their North American style tanks filled. San Gil was on our way….perfect. We tried both places, and they both refused to fill our tanks….we were not 100 percent sure why, but Derek thought that maybe they had said that the pressure levels and the fittings were different, making it impossible. We still had a bit of gas, so we decided to head on to camp and see if we had enough fuel to make coffee and dinner for the next few days.
June 6, 2018 – June 8, 2018
The main highway from the city of Bucaramanga to the capital city of Bogota is a two lane highway that winds itself through the foothills and mountains of the Cordillera Occidental, part of the Andean Mountains. Because of the large rigs, the steep curving roads and the complete lack of passing lanes, short distances take a surprisingly long time to drive. Our route for the day was only 77 kilometres but took us approximately 2.5 hours to drive.
June 4, 2018 – June 6, 2018
We left Mompox and headed towards the city of Bucaramanga. We had plans to camp at Finca Carajo, a small farm in a cloud forest that had a few hiking trails, and we were excited to get to some cooler temperatures. We made it to the beautiful city of Bucaramanga, where I saw that there were two routes up into the mountains surrounding the city. The recommended one would get us out of the city faster, but then showed miles and miles of curving, switched back roads. The second route would keep us in the city longer, but the mountain road looked much straighter. We chose the second route.
June 1, 2018 – June 4, 2018
We needed to do a fairly major resupply before we could leave Cartagena. After a few false stops at what Google Maps had mistakenly indicated were grocery stores, we had a full fridge and were on the road again. Not knowing how long our shopping would take we had picked a spot close to Cartagena for the night to break up the drive the drive to our next destination which was Mompox.
May 25, 2018 to June 1, 2018
Upon arriving in Cartagena, we needed pesos, as always, and then looked for a place we could stay for a few days until we could get our truck back. It was super hot we were carrying our travel bags and we had our dog in tow. Fortunately, we found our land legs, a bank machine and some free wifi pretty quickly. Derek waited outside with the dog while I went into the air-conditioned shopping mall and selected a convenient hotel.
The container was supposed to arrive on Friday the 25th, the same day that we arrived, but when we were finally able to get some shipping information, we found out that the shipment had been delayed…at first we were told that the truck would arrive on Wednesday the 30th, then we were told it would arrive on Monday the 28th. Eventually, it actually arrived on the 29th.
May 20, 2018 – May 25, 2018
We had been told to meet our captain and the crew at a nearby restaurant at 5pm on Sunday, May the 20th. We had visited the restaurant the day before and they told us that it was not pet friendly….the owner has 7 dogs and she said her dogs would EAT Piper….so, we left Piper (temporarily) with the gracious owner of Wunderbar Hostel where we had stayed the last two nights. We then went and met up with the people we would be living in close quarters with for the next five days.