June 16, 2018 – Jun 18, 2018
We had decided a few weeks ago that we were not going to visit the capital city of Bogota. It is huge and cities are difficult with the truck, and if we were to find a hostel to stay in for a few nights we would need to find a safe place to stash the vehicle. As it turns out, we ended up driving through the city twice, through our failed attempt to visit San Jose de Guaviare.
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 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.
April 24, 2018 – May 4, 2018
One more beach camp on the Nicoya Peninsula, this time near the town of Malpais. And again, heavenly. We walked down the beach one night for a drink and some ceviche as we watched the sun set. On one afternoon, we walked to the nearby town to a little store, then returned to our camp by the beach, not seeing another person until we neared our campsite. Riders on horseback would occasionally wander past between us and the shore. It was beautiful and peaceful and so, if you are not tired of seeing them yet, here are some more beach and sunset pictures.
We did manage to do one of the tours while we were at El Pantano, and that was the tour of Finca de San Antonio. The finca is run by four brothers and is home to them, their families and their 80 year old parents. Manuel, one of the brothers, picked us up at El Pantano and we began the walk from there to the finca. The dirt road was steep and the day, even at 8 am, was already hot and muggy.
We looked at the different routes we could drive to get from Rio Dulce to Lanquin. There were a few options given by Google Maps, but our iOverlander application warned that the roads of some of the routes were bad…really rough, unpassible bridges, rockslides, that kind of thing.