Night buses are not fun. fact. 12 hours on an outrageously cold bus (the drivers like to show off with their new technology and inist on full blast ac and back-to-back pirate rambo dvds all night long)

Despite this when we arrived in Bogota at 6.30 am we were very happy. We got to watch the sun come up over a city and it was a fun way to see a city for the first time without many signs of life. We spent a couple of days there checking out the museums and buildings, particularly enjoying just sitting warming ourselves up in the sun (Bogota is very very high up so the air is thin and cold) watching the Colombian world go by in the beautiful Plaza Bolivar. We saw more gold than anybody ever needs to see in the Museo del Oro (there is such a thing as gold overkill.... 4 floors of the stuff gets tiresome after a while), lots of paintings of famous people we sadly couldnt learn about due to our continually poor spanish, and some extremely scary 7000 year old indian mummies.

Sadly Bogota did in fact live up to the scare stories of Colombia, as two of the guests of our hostel were stabbed outside our door whilst we were there, one in the hand sounded particularly nasty. They were ok, although to add insult to injury they were forced to stay in the same place for a month for their treatment, but it meant we were essentially under curfew as it was simply too dangerous after dark. On our penultimate day we stepped off a bus into the aftermath of a riot and a fight between unemployed men and lots of policia, walking into the cloud of tear gas that had just been deployed. Rather unpleasant to say the least. This was sadly the final straw for us and Colombia, we were getting irritated that everywhere we looked up and wanted to go to was off limits due to the new national state of emergency declared owing to some pikey stealing lots of peoples money in a banking scam, and said people becoming understandably enraged and starting lots of naughty riots.

Our desire to feel a bit more secure in a hostel, and wanting to get out into the open air once more found us on a 24 hour bus from Bogota to the border. Rather uneventful but stressful all the same, as we were unsure whether we had to wait until it was light to go through Popoyan (one of the current danger zones) which kept us awake most of the night. I will also add that NOBODY can complain about service station food until they have mistakenly ordered cow stomach/intestine soup (we stupidly believed those chunks to be chicken); even worse than it sounds, if that is possible. Chewy, slimy, fatty and it tasted awful! Nobody needs their question of "what is that Kate?" answered with "That is Villi Matt. Villi".