On the road: A trip to the north

10 August 2009

By mistake, we buy a handbook for car travellers by in Colombia – we were told it was a book with the bus schedules. As we had the book already, we decided to rent a car and explore the north of Bogotá on our own. Driving in Colombia? - no problem. The roads are good, the drivers disciplined. We even understood most of the traffic signs. Once we picked up a local lady that was hitch hiking. She asked if we lived in the neighbouring town – Natasha's Spanish is that good!

The National car rental agency in Bogotá was extremely professional and very helpful. When choosing our car, the agency not only had to provide a model in our chosen category, but also with a licence plate that would match our travel dates with the Pica y Placa system: To reduce traffic, any car can only drive the big cities on two out of the five working days, depending on the last number of its license plate. In our case, only a plate ending in a zero allowed us to depart on Tuesday and return on Friday.

We visited Tunja, a pleasant, partly colonial city. Here the tourist police officers not only protect us but also provide us with free guided tours of the city's architectural treasures; they are very courteous and friendly. We headed on to Villa de Leyva, a most beautiful colonial town. All houses are white, which makes for a strong contrast with the surrounding green mountains. We hiked up to the Laguna de Iguaque on 3600 meters. What a view we had on the country from up there! Easy to believe that this laguna was linked to legends of the gods in the beliefs of the regional indigenous people. Our last stop was the Laguna de Guatavita. This crater lake combines natural beauty with an example of the lengths the colonialists went to, to rob the “New World” and its Inca inhabitants of its gold. The lake is linked to the legend of “El Dorado”: a lake filled with gold from centuries of Inca rituals. This legend lead the greedy colonialists to draw up plans to drain the lake in order to collect all the gold suspected to be at the bottom. Today, a 70 meter deep incision into the crater is testimony to this effort which ultimately failed. No gold has ever been found, but today the lake is 70 meters less deep.

Fotos of Tunja, Villa de Leyva, Laguna de Iguaque, Laguna de Guatavita