Colombia Day 1

What a great first day in Colombia.  We took a private tour to Lake Guatavita and Zipiquira Salt Cathedral.  This is about the only thing we planned from home. We knew for sure that we wanted to go to the salt mines because, well, who wouldn’t want to do that? But then we found a tour that did the salt mines and Lake Guatavita for just an additional $30 dollars each.  Everyone knows that thetwinsontour love a good deal and jamming as many activities into one day as possible, so it was a no brainer to plan an 11 hour full day tour for our first day in Colombia.  Now it may not have been the best idea to plan such a long excursion for our first day, but we did it anyways. 

Leaving Bogota, we got to see the bike lanes. On the weekends, they close down more than 100 km of road, and dedicate them to bicycles. There are bikes everywhere! Once we left the city and were on the country roads, there were even more bikes. I actually think i saw more bicycles than cars. thetwinsontour were very glad that they had decided it was a double Dramamine kind of day! There’s lots of hills, swerving, lane changing, bicycle avoiding, quick stopping, and getting out of the car so that the car can make it up a slick hill involved in today’s adventure. 

Our tour guide took us up to a lookout in a shady part of Bogota so that we could see all the different stratosphere of the Colombian society– 6 of them–from rich to poor. We were supposed to be able to see all the different housing types and neighborhoods. Due to the aforementioned lack of sleep, the significance and interpretation was lost on me. So I did what all confused and dumbfounded tourists do, I nodded my head enthusiastically and said “ahh, sí” over and over. 

Lake Guatavita is famous because of the legend of El Dorado (there are several legendary cities of gold throughout South America that the Spanish searched for forever). This legend is based on the coronation ceremony for the chiefs of the Muisca people.  It takes years to learn all the necessary skills to be chief-at least the first 12 years of your life. Then you must go out in the wilderness and live alone for 9 years, with no contact from anyone, not even your mommy. So after many years of studying and isolation, the young chief is ready to be declared chief.  This involves him going out on this small crater lake on a gold boat at 5am so that the rising sun can shine on him. He is also dressed in gold, but not like a suite of armor.  He is covered in honey and they blow gold dust on him and the dust sticks to the honey. I don’t know if that attracts flies or other bugs? They didn’t really cover those important questions.  While the honey and gold covered chief is out there on the boat, his faithful subjects stand at the top of the crater cheering and throwing gold objects at him.  Hence the legend of El Dorado.  

It’s a nice little hike around the top of the crater, but there’s a lot of steps to the top. And its a much higher altitude than what thetwinsontour are accustomed to.  This is where you correctly infer lots of heavy breathing from thetwinsontour.  Luckily, we were part of a large, slow moving group, so we didn’t feel obligated to run up the hill.  We were the only English speakers in our tour group despite the fact that our local guide was wearing a Kansas City Royals cap. 

I just had a thought, can we call visiting a mine spelunking? Despite having sworn off spelunking several years ago, somehow we keep finding ourselves in caves.  A mine is kind of like a dry cave with neither stalagtites nor stalagmites, but I am going to say it qualifies. Anyways, the salt mine was pretty neat, and way different from the one in Hutchinson, Kansas. First of all you are able to walk into them from ground level–there is no need to take a miner’s elevator to get down there. I missed the explanation as to why there is a cathedral and chapels in the mine, so don’t ask me about the history of it.  I do know that it is fairly new though (like 50 years or less). There are 14 different chapels that are supposed to signify the different stations of the cross, but it really takes a lot of imagination to interpret that. For some of the chapels they even brought in marble floors. And they have colored lights illuminating all of the chapels because everyone loves a cave (or salt mine) with colored lights! thetwinsontour love artificially colored cave lighting.  All in all it was quite enjoyable.  

Despite the fact that the Salt Mines were only like 30 km from Bogota, it took over 2 hours to get back to our hotel due to monstrous traffic jams. It was after 8 by the time we made it to our hotel. It was a good thing that we didn’t eat lunch until after 3pm because that meant we were still full and didn’t have to brave Bogota by night to find something to eat. (Don’t worry mother, it was a really big lunch, and we had snacks.)  thetwinsontour were worn out and quickly hit the sack. 

that is it for day 1. 

thetwinsontour