Travel day! Villavieja to Bogota, Colombia

We were up a little late again yesterday morning. Because of the itchy rash, I haven't been sleeping much and so when I am actually sleeping in the morning, Ruth just allows me to sleep. That's all fine and dandy, but we should be getting up earlier on travel days.

We paid our bill at the hotel in Villavieja. Nice friendly little town and we would have liked to have stayed longer if it hadn't been so darned hot!

Amazing scenery at Colombia's Tatacoa Desert (part 2)

We're in Bogota now (that story will come tomorrow morning!), but we still wanted to continue this morning's post. So you might want to read that first if you haven't already. It's available here...

http://www.travelwithkevinandruth.com/2015/11/a-bumpy-ride-to-colombias-spectacular.html

Okay...so if you've read that part we can now continue with our desert tour!

A bumpy ride to Colombia's spectacular Tatacoa Desert (Part 1)

The only reason we came to Villavieja was to see the Tatacoa Desert. But during the day from 10:00am to 4:00pm, it's too hot to do anything else but laze around. So other than going for breakfast, that's exactly what we did until about 3:00pm.

At that time, we walked down to the central plaza and made arrangements with a "moto-taxi" to take us into the desert.

Travel day! San Agustin to Villavieja, Colombia.

You never quite know what to expect on a travel day. Sometimes everything goes smoothly, and other times it does not.

Yesterday was a "does not" kind of a day!

The odd statues at San Agustin, Colombia

Yesterday morning, we walked down to the main road and took the local bus to the archaeological park. It's only a 3 km walk, but we decided to take the 1,200 peso ($0.55 CAD) bus.

We had already paid the admission fee via the park passport we had bought during the tour yesterday.

Busy day, including Colombia's highest waterfall...

Yesterday morning we were sitting at the table here at the hostel, having a hot chocolate and just finishing up writing the blog when the girl from the hostel comes over with a guy who does jeep tours of the area. We had wanted to do one of these tours because it's the only way to see some of the sights we wanted to see.

But he was leaving right then! In fact, the jeep was waiting outside with four other people already in it, and he was looking for two more passengers to fill the vehicle.

Not many birds, but lots of butterflies!

We came to San Agustin to visit the archaeological park here, but we heard rumors that it was to be closed on Tuesday. It's supposed to be open every day of the week, so we figured that the only way to find out for sure was to walk on over there!

The main part of the park is 3 kms (1.9 miles) from town, so if it ended up being closed at least we would get a walk out of it!

Travel day! Popayan to San Agustin, Colombia.

Had to get up fairly early yesterday to get to the bus station at a decent hour. We had read that the road between Popayan and San Agustin is in pretty bad shape at some parts, and that the 135 km (84 mile) journey would take 5 hours.

Got up, went out to get some take away breakfast stuff, stopped at the BanColombia ATM to get some more pesos then back to the room to grab our bags. As we left the hotel, we flagged down one of the thousands of little yellow taxi cabs, and paid him 3,000 pesos ($1.36 CAD) to take us to the bus station.

No better, but no worse...

Went for a walk around town yesterday morning. Stopped into a place for breakfast and ended up having lunch. We weren't really presented with a menu, and by the time we finished talking to the guy about what to have we ended up with plates of rice and meat again. A little expensive too...with the hot chocolate it came to 24,000 pesos ($10.92 CAD) for the two of us.

Too funny. I know that's still dirt cheap, but it's more than we have paid at other places.

A visit to a Colombian doctor...

Not for Ruth this time though. Fortunately, her kidney infection from a week or so ago seems to be all better.

This time, it's my turn.

About five or six days ago I noticed a rash appearing on the left side of my right calf. I've had this twice before in the past couple of years, both times while in Mexico. But this time it got much worse.