Last night poor Liz got a few more itchy bites to add to her collection, fleas were the suspects.

We headed out without breakfast with the intention of getting some snacks at the bus terminal, Columbia is very vegy unfriendly but at least the coffee is good.

It must have been raining really hard during the night going by the difficulty in finding a dry route across the road to the bus terminal.

It was an expected 5 hours to Bucaramanga but expected does not mean reality in South America. We got to the outshirts of Cucuta and hit a line of static traffic. We didn't need to ask it was almost certain to be landslides.

Three hours later we began to make tentative moves forward with frequent stops in order to negociate the semi blocked roads.

This section of road was incredibly scenic, it had the prettyness of the Lake District in England combined with the scale of the Andes. It actually moved me close to tears - this is impressive considering the amount of travelling we have done.

The road headed over a mountain pass to Pamplona, an attractive town with the typical whitewashed church in the center. It looked especially nice as we climbed out of the valley towards Bucaramanga.

The road just kept twisting itself up and up. The scenery was still stunning, lush undulating mountains rising high into the clouds. Small terracota roofed houses with locals in hats and ponchos completed the picture if I could have taken a picture through the dirty windows.

After about two hours the road finally started to flaten out. I don't know how high we were but going by the low temperature and thin air I recon we were in the 4000m plus region, we were pretty much on a level with the summits near by. The Siera Nevada mountains somewhere to our left were much higher still however. The locals had those rosy cheeks similar to the locals in the high regions of Peru.

What goes up must come down and what a decent. Huge drops were glimpsed through lush vegetation and gaps in the clouds. This was another amazing scenic section.

After a long twisty decent Bucaramanga at 1000m could be seen far below it was an impressive site and far bigger than expected.

We were pretty knackered the journey took 11 hours of twisty roads. We headed out on the mission to try and find a vegetarian meal. The best we could find was some chips at a very popular road side stall.