Bogota - Armenia - Salento: 12/03

I caught the bus from Bogota with Janet from Sydney - at 63 years young she continues to travel the world and tackle it head on. We journeyed out along the Bogota plain towards the west, passing through fields of Australian weeds like gum trees and Blackwood and an endless string of luxurious holiday resorts and adventure camps that preceded the town of Ibague. Many of these were defunct, with weeds growing high around murky swimming pools and the peeling paint on abandoned hotel rooms. But some were maintained - obviously the economic boom that had created this glut is over and the fittest had survived. Then we began ascending the inevitable range.

With 65 million people in quite a small space Colombia certainly is crowded. A large portion of the terrain remains undeveloped because of the Andes and the Amazon, which have both also made creating rail infrastructure difficult - old trucks are the main form of cargo distribution and rule the roads. With the population grasping at first-world consumerism they run frequently through the limited arteries feeding into Bogota. All of these arteries pass through the Andes on narrow winding roads. One might ask how does this road system hold up to all the trucks, buses, speedbumps, roadworks, police/military checks, hold-ups, accidents and toll points¿ Answer: generally it doesnt. On our trip one of the frequent accidents held us up for two hours all up. The traffic banked the other looked even worse. Just another day in paradise.

We arrived in Armenia (a town recently flattened by an earthquake and rebuilt in a modern fashion) and managed by just 15min to transfer to the last collectivo to Salento. This rattled through in about an hour - en route we were stopped by the army to be patted down as a routine security check. Ordinarily the anti-establishmentarianism would have risen like leavened bread inside me at this, but after hearing the horror stories about night buses and such I was kind of glad for it. A good patting down by a man with a gun in uniform never goes astray either... So after that we arrived in Salento and went to our hostel, meeting Sven from Germany before hitting the hay.