Popayan greeted us with colonial whitewashed facades in the center and a very relaxed athmosphere due to plenty of students that live in this university town. But we were also very warmly welcomed by Felipe, a photographer and traveler that gave us a place to stay for a couple of days. We did some cooking with his mom and prepared "Kaiserschmarrn" as a typical and traditional european food. Popayan is also a UNESCO world heritage town for its cuisine but although they are very proud of it we haven't really marked any differences in the daily diet of the locals. Apart from wandering the city we also decided to visit nearby sulphur hot springs and couldn't wait to finally get our car since we needed an eternity just to use the public transport to get there and missed plenty of beautiful spots on the way.
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Colombian capital is enormous and cold. An estimated eight million people are inhabiting a part of wide high altitude valley and even from the city's best observation point - the Montserrat, we struggled to see the end of the city through the smog. The tall buildings of city's business district are giving way to colourful barrios that rise up the hills and spread into the plains. We visited Quinta de Bolivar, a residence of the famous Simon Bolivar, learned a bit more about his life and felt like a tourist attractions ourselves when a class of young Colombians on their field trip started interrogating us about our origin and travels. We also marveled the fine golden handcraft of pre-Colombian civilisations in the famous Bogota's Museum of Gold. Our great couchsurfer hosts Jonathan and Christian (both musical souls) showed us the part of life in Bogota, that's hidden for the turists. We visited a small theatre where we tried to follow the story with our poor knowledge of spanish, we tried the local tamales (spiced rice with meat cooked in banana leaf) from the street and the most fun experience of all - played "tejo"· Tejo is a latino version of boules where the goal is to hit a marked circle in a clay target with a catch... There are small bags filled with gunpowder around the circle and hitting one of them results in a big bang, plenty of points and an obligatory celebration cursing. Add a box of beers and you can imagine where this can lead to :) |
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February 2019
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