30/04/2019 - Salt Cathedral, Bogota, Colombia

We got up and had breakfast with some new guests that are from Germany and have arrived in Bogota after travelling around South America for the last few months. They are a retired couple and seem to travel quite a lot! Then we got sorted and headed to the bus stop, after some clear instructions from John (the hostel man) about our journey ahead. We got to the bus terminal (las aguas) and managed (with a little help from a random Colombian) to top up the local equivalent of an oyster card. We asked some other people at the bus stop if we were at the right place for the B74 bus and they said yes (all in broken Spanish!) and then after about 5 minutes of waiting the guy we had been speaking to poked us and gestured for us to follow him to another part of the bus terminal, I’m not sure what had changed but with nothing else to go on we followed him! When it arrived, we hopped onto our bendy bus, which was absolutely packed. The bus journey was about one hour long to our stop, which was the last bus stop on the route called Portal del Norte. We got off and tapped the oysters out before seeing some minibuses with Zipa written on the signs in the front windscreen. We hopped on the bus without really being asked a destination or for a ticket and hoped for the best. About an hour into the journey (we had forgotten to ask John how long this was all supposed to take) we started wandering if in fact we were going in the right direction. People were hopping on and off the bus the whole time, not really at proper bus stops, so we had no idea what was going on or whether we were going to the right place. Thankfully we had downloaded the Mapps.me app – it is an offline map basically, so we could check we were actually headed in the right direction. About another half hour later we realised we were in the town of Zipaquira, which was a relief! However, not knowing which stop to get off we actually ended up in the bus terminal where the bus ended its journey. Not knowing how much this had actually cost the bus driver took about £2 in total from us, a pretty cheap journey! Then we got out and were basically in a random town with no map and no idea where we were going. Thankfully there were some road signs that we followed for a couple of kilometres that got us to the salt cathedral, via a coffee and toilet stop of course. We got our audio guides and went in. Josh pressed 1 instead of 01 into his audio guide at the first pit-stop and so got a bit of a scrambled description of what was going on throughout the trip I think! We were basically in a cathedral that was built 200m underground from a salt mine! It was absolutely huge, and is apparently still a functioning church. The audio guide basically described what each cross and sculpture represented, but Josh and I were more interested in how the mine was actually made etc, so actually only got about 3 stations in before giving up on our audio guides and just taking a stroll (Josh with camera at hand of course).

The moment we decided to give up on the audio tour.

There was Ave Maria playing on repeat, and we saw the largest underground cross in the world apparently!

Yes, that tiny cross in the centre is actually the worlds largest underground cross!

At the end, in the bottom of the mine there were loads of tourist souvenir shops selling religious symbols and emeralds too.

A few photos of inside the cathedral.

We walked back to the bus station (grabbed water and a cheese arepa on the way, so delicious!) and I was saying Bogota out loud whilst trying to find a bus with a sign in the window, before two men hopped up from their bench, repeated ‘Bogota?’ back to us before beckoning Josh and I to sit on their otherwise empty minibus. With seemingly no other options to get back to Bogota, we sat on the bus and it started off, again stopping at any place with people, a man standing in the doorway of the bus hopping off every few minutes to hustle passengers on for any amount of the journey possible. We paid up again around £2, and eventually, 1hr30min later got back to the bus stop Portal de Norte. We oyster-ed into the bus station and managed to get on the J74 back to Las Aguas in Bogota. It was rush hour so this part of the journey took a good 2hr 30mins. Thankfully I managed to get a seat but about halfway along I had my arm on the windowsill and looked down and there were a load of cockroaches running around me. I managed to hold my squeal in, but physically jumped onto the seat next to me (thankfully it was Josh sitting next to me!) We swapped seats, thanks Josh! After what felt like forever we were back in Bogota, near our Hostel. Whilst the salt cathedral was enjoyable we both agreed we would advise anyone else to do it by taxi or not at all, the journey was a mission! Both super hungry we went for a chicken burger dinner and had a couple of glasses of wine each. After dinner we passed a lively bar (it is bank holiday tomorrow) so went in for a bit of a dance and a few tequila shots! We made some friends in there. I think the local people wanted to speak to the English ones! You can definitely feel the attention on blue eyes/light hair here, it’s hard for either of us to look Colombian. Josh got some attention for his outfit (classic Josh: lively shorts, tee, and converse combo) I think they are not used to so much colour/tight/short shorts on a guy! After making a few friends, we decided to head back to the hostel. You have to knock/ring the doorbell to get in the front door of our hostel, I think for security reasons, so we didn’t want to be too late or rowdy! We got in at about 23:00 and chatted with John for a little while before heading to bed.