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 :) Hearing about the amount of Venezuelans leaving the country, we prepared ourselves for a lot of waiting at the border with Colombia. The migrant wave is supposed to be similar in size to the one in Syria. But with the amount of information we have to process these days, we have become numb even for the most disturbed news that the media is offering us. Seeing the situation with our own eyes, with red cross, army and police fully in action really left a mark on us. On the Venezuelan side the opposition party was handing out free meals and the people stormed the food stands like mad. Once in Colombia, the situation wasn't much better. The people were everywhere... Resting and sleeping on the ground, getting their documents sorted out, changing money, eating on hundreds of street-food stands that were taking advantage of the mass of tired and hungry people entering the country... Young and old, families and singles, everyone tried to find their place in this mess and somehow continue the journey. In the end, the waiting part wasn't even that bad, but seeing thousands of people fleeing their own country in total insecurity really makes you think about the world you live in. Yet again, we were the only foreigners and we were drawing quite some attention. With addition of the news about bird-flu breaking out in one of the border towns, we decided to hurry up a bit and took three consecutive busses to get to the town of San Gil. |
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February 2019
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