20th March 2015 – Bogota to Villa de Leyva – 2015-03-29 23:24

Today we only have a 186 kilometer drive to our destination of Villa de Leyva, but we are stopping 42 kilometers from Bogota at Zipaquira which is famous for its underground Salt Cathedral. The drive out of Bogota is in peak hour traffic and we’re driving down the main road north out of town which has 8 lanes going each way,ÿ it’s a Massive road. The centre 4 lanes are dedicated to buses, with 2 lanes each way and large bus stations between them. There are buses as far as we can see. Bogota doesn’t have a train system and with 7 million people to move around they rely on the buses. Blue B has more problems in the traffic and is running on 3 cylinders so we pull over, only to discover there is a clip missing off the distributor from the work that was done on the car yesterday. It wasn’t long before the clip is replaced & we’re back on the road again. The salt mine is a fully working mine that extracts the salt from the salt rock.The cathedral is 180 meters underground and was built by the miners so they have a place to worship. They have normal church services here and there is a special chapel where they have baptisms. They also hold weddings here and the church can hold 3,000 people, it is huge and with the special lighting that’s been installed it is beautiful. The pulpit, priests chairs and altar are carved out of the salt rock. The drive from Zipaquira starts out on a very rocky bumpy pot holed road, that eventually turns into a divided highway climbing and winding up to 2,800 meters above sea level. Casper and Blue B are now running well. Casper spent yesterday in a workshop having the wheel hub machined and the bearings replaced. This is the second time this trip this has had to be done. Casper is running a Ford Sierra rear end and it appears to be not as robust as the MG ones. We get held up at road works for nearly half an hour before continuing through pretty hilly countryside. Villa de Leyva is a beautiful village where all the houses have red tiled roofs and white walls, narrow cobbled streets with overhanging balconies covered in geraniums. Our hotel is also very pretty with lots of colorurful Bougainvillea, cannas and geraniums.Once we’ve checked into the hotel we walk into the centre of town and have a tea aromatica with fruit, which is just beautiful, served hot and full of berries & Apple.