Day 235 Saturday 2nd June This is a nice hostal with a great shower with plenty of hot water and we wished we had not booked the other one, but they have our bags so we need to go back. After breakfast we went back to the room to get ready and at 9.30am as we were packing we heard a woman saying “No, no, no”. We had earlier seen a woman in the hostel having an argument with her young child and just assumed that once again she was fighting with him, but the “no, no, no” persisted and got louder. By the time we realised the yelling was coming from outside and we made it to the window, we just caught the aftermath of a mugging. From our window we only had a limited ... read more

Day 227 Friday 25th May We have booked a tour with the guide who showed us the hostel we are staying in (Yasadventure in Joaquin Pinto E7-68) so we were ready and on the road by 8.30am to go to the Equator Line. Our first stop was the extinct Pululahua Volcano which has a crater 400m deep and 5km across which is now used for agriculture. This is a spectacular sight with the fertile farmland surrounded by the dramatic and steep sides of the crater, we were lucky to have a clear view as apparently by about 11.00am it is shrouded in mist. The next stop is the Museo Solar Inti Nan which is meant to be the true equator but actually still not correct, those damn GPSs now prove that this second site is wrong. ... read more

Day 219 Thursday 17th May Awoken at 1.30am by a car pulling into the carpark below, they were continually opening and slamming closed the doors and beeped the doors opened and closed for about 5 minutes then it went quiet. A few minutes later they were in the hallway outside our door having a conversation, the problem is there are open slat vents above the doors so the sound proofing is non-existent. I know over the years there has been criticism of the Sydney Opera House, we have the answer for the sound engineers come to the Hotel Metropol they have the perfect acoustics you can hear every sound from every room just like it is inches from you. This leads me to the next events, we had not realised that we got a ... read more

Day 208 Sunday 6th May Woke up slightly seedy this morning, knowing that I may have hit it a bit too hard last night, but it was a Saturday night so that’s okay, although every night is Saturday night for us. We had planned on spending the morning at the park next door where there was supposed to be a flea market but discovered that they no longer happened so did the next best thing of trying to organise our laundry. We discovered a laundrymat a block away so we put together a bag of our smelliest and handed them over. According to the Lonely Planet there was another flea market about ten blocks away so we put on our hiking boots and headed off to check it out. On Sundays in Bogota they ... read more

Day 197 Wednesday 25th April Woke once more to the sound of bells, and had me wondering if the priest had heard word of heathens in town and was trying to flush them out. Should find out where he lives and park out the front revving a motorcycle all night and see how he likes it. No chance of sleeping in here so we got up and walked down to the main plaza in search of a good coffee. Discovered another small café and Shelley finally got a coffee she regarded as drinkable. I know she is a real “coffee snob” and is hard to please, but I’m not and I can confirm the coffee in Colombia is crap. You would have better chances of finding a snowman in Fiji than a good cup ... read more