Date: 26/01
City: La Vega, Columbia
Kilometres ridden: 370
Cumulative kilometre: 31613

We got up earlier so we could avoid the rush hour, so we were on the road by 8AM… Hey, that’s really early for us! 😛

All worked fine and the first 80km were great, it was cloudy but no rain and the road was a two lane highway. It changed to a one lane highway and at this time we decided to get our rain gear on, since it looked cloudy and the road was sort of wet. After a while we left the mountain ranges and came into the flats where we started to sweat. We stopped around lunch time, by coincidence at an African/Jurassic Theme park. There was a dinosaurs skeleton hanging from the ceiling, some warriors were watching our bikes and all the chairs had spears as backrests.

After the break we nearly continued until sunset. When we pulled up at one hotel we saw the bikes of Del and Tonja (another rider couple that we met on the Stahlratte), what a coincidence!
At night we had a couple of beers together and chatted about our trip so far. Later Andrea skyped us and told us that a friend of hers just moved to Cali, so we decided to go to Cali after the salt cathedral and meet up with her.

Date: 27/01
City: Bogota, Columbia
Kilometres ridden: 147
Cumulative kilometre: 31760

We had a nice breakfast with Dell and Tonja and then we took a couple of pictures from the hotel staff with our bikes before we said good bye to Dell and Tonja.

We went back through the mountain area, so the progress was slow. Below is a picture looking down to the road that we came from.

 

After a small detour through some dirt road (Garmin thought it would be faster) we arrived at the cathedral. The cathedral is an art project build in an old salt mine.

We thought it would be only one Cathedral and expected to stay there only for half an hour or so. While standing in the line-up we were almost turning around. But , again in the end we really enjoyed it. It took us more than three hours to get out againJ. First of all it was more than just one cathedral. The artist produced thirteen exhibits, representing the suffering of Jesus. On top of it there are multiple church halls, one large cathedral and a light and sound show, plenty to see. Firstly below are some pictures from the exhibits representing the stations of Christ’s Passion

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And then we arrived at the actual Cathedral… it was huge! The name salt cathedral is only for tourists since it has no bishop and therefore no official status as a cathedral in Catholicism. The picture on the left is the view from a balcony to the front of the cathedral. The right picture was taken from the front of the Cathedral, the balcony can be seen on the top middle.

And there were two other smaller church halls as well.

On our way to the sound and light show we found a couple of other interesting exhibits, a water pool that acted as a mirror.

Large stone carvings, Sigird is pointing to an owl and on the right picture there is a spider.

 

And then there was a coffee shop and pop corn stand 😀

The sound and light show was setup in a huge tunnel with lots of multicolour LEDs on the ceiling, which showed animations synchronised to the music, nice touch.

After the show we went back to our bikes. Since it took us much longer than expected, we got caught in the middle of Bogota when it started to get dark. So we had a look for some hotels, but could only find something from 150US$ onwards. After a while we found a hotel that was in our price range and looked good as well. Tomorrow we will be heading towards Cali to meet with Mel, Andreas friend who just arrived in Colombia.