In the last blog we fast-forwarded through Ecuador, missing Galapogos and countless other sites of note. This week was another which reminded us of the mildly upsetting fact that despite removing the most time consuming things in our lives, particularly our jobs, we still don't have enough time to do and see anything like as much as we want. Anyway, we had a week before a flight to Panama, so the race was on to see as much of Colombia as we could.

The first bus we took went to Pasto, a 7 hour journey on pretty good roads. It took us about two hours longer because we got stopped by about 6 police blockades looking for drugs and hoodlums. All the guys got lined up against the bus and searched and the girls got to stand by and watch - so if you ever want to carry drugs in Colombia, wear a dress… At one of the stops a Chinese boy, probably only about 17 or 18, got taken off the bus and taken away by the soldiers. It was quite unpleasant. We tried to talk to him and he spoke no word of either Spanish or English, so how he had got on in South America we don't know. They then discovered he had no passport entry stamp, so he was truly on his own.

Anyway Pasto was pretty boring, with only bad fast food that didn't even have the courtesy of being cheap: what we might call a "journey town", although we did meet a nice couple from Switzerland. Back on the bus next day, this time to Cali, the home of Colombian salsa.

That bus journey, as with all the journeys we took in Colombia, had great views of some beautiful countryside. Similar mountain terrain as we had seen all along the Andes, in Peru, Bolivia and Southern Ecuador, but mostly those countries are dry on the coast, often desert. The more north you go the greener it is, and it makes Colombia a beautiful country.

Anyway, salsa. We were amazing. The locals said they had never seen such grace and style and asked us for lessons. Only kidding. We had a pizza and a few beers, headed to a really cool salsa bar, La Fuente, sat, watched and drank some more… the locals were all pretty good, but it was a Wednesday night and the dance floor wasn't quite ready for the British X-factor yet.

Next day, another early morning bus, this time to the capital of the Colombian Coffee Zone, a place called Pereira. We had heard that you can stay right on the coffee farms in a few places, and with some luck we managed to find one, called finca villa maria. It was really remote, but well worth it, about 75 hectares of mountainous land all filled with coffee, plantain and banana trees. There was loads of wildlife, in particular birds, and a pool. We met a nice couple and their parents from the US who were avid birders, and enjoyed walks and bird watching with them. We also got a tour of the coffee factory, for which see the blog photos.

After another night in Pereira in a dodgy looking hotel we went to Bogota. Our experience in Bogota was another victim of our time crunch, in particular as we turned up on a Sunday the day before a bank holiday, this meant everything was closed and deserted in the old town and it was really hard to find a hostel. We still enjoyed the City, parts of which are very plush and rich, other parts very poor. We went up to a salt cathedral (Zipaquira) about an hour out of town, where they had built an enormous catholic cathedral out of a working salt mine. It was interesting, even if we couldn't find a guide in English, and as always impressive the lengths people go to for their religion. We also got to do some digging for salt with a pickaxe… where Michelle let out her aggressive streak!

The best thing for us about Bogata was the museums and galleries. The Museo del Oro (gold museum) is by far the best we have seen on our trip so far, and charted the use of gold across Colombia since time immemorial… Gold from thousands of years ago had been found and cleaned and looked as new, nearly all tribes in Colombia used gold jewellery, ornaments and implements in their lives (and deaths) as it represented the power of the sun, so the museum painted the history of the ethnology of these tribes through the types of trinkets etc that they made. There was a lot about Shamanism, and the power the shaman wielded through being high all the time and adorning themselves with gold jaguars or snakes or whatever animal best represented their mood at the time… We also saw the Botero gallery, an excellent free art gallery with Monet, Dali, Renoit all represented, alongside Botero's own paintings (which are uniformly of overweight aristocratic looking men and women and fat horses)…

After Colombia we flew to Panama City, and spent four excellent days there. It is a bit like a Central American Dubai. I don't know exactly how indebted it is, but it has certainly bought into the loose credit binge. New half finished buildings are everywhere, mostly huge skyscrapers. It has to be overbuilding, and its quite a shame, a large area known as Casco Viejo, the old town, which is full of gorgeous Spanish/ French colonial architecture is totally run down and has been taken over by squatters, with half the buildings blocked up as people moved into the skyscraper condo's.

But Panama has everything, shops, comfort, good hotels, good food and quality nightlife, and we enjoyed ourselves. The canal is alright too, we saw a massive cruise ship go through, and hope to spend less in 2 months than they would in a week. We went off to the horse races and had a great night out, placing winners on 5 out of 8 races, although we didn't see much in terms of profit at the end of the night we managed to cover the booze… Finally, we hired a car and spent two days traveling down the pan-Americana road towards the countryside. We found a remote town in the rainforest called el Valle which had a shop that sold roquefort and proper proscuitto ham. Random class. We then did two slightly hairraising things, firstly zip wiring past a waterfall in the canopy of part of the rainforest - which was fun - and then reversing down the main toll motorway road as we took a wrong turn and didn't have the 60 cent toll on us and the git wouldn't let us pass through - this was not so fun. Panama felt like an oasis in the middle of our trip, and we liked it, if we ever need to run from the international system of policing it is most certainly where you shall find us. Tomorrow we are going to the jungle.

Observations and factoids: Christmas (navidad) has all but arrived in Colombia, cheap Christmas tat is EVERYWHERE; employing 20 something hoodlum-like kids outside your clothes shop has to be a bad way to attract business; Only 11 countries (Ecuador, Colombia, Brazil, DRC, Congo, Gabon, Tanzania, Kenya, Sudan, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea) touch the Ecuator, so there aren't very many options so "see" it; Colombia used to have a thriving coffee industry, but companies (i.e. starbucks) have perfected efficient and cheap coffee tree growth and cultivation in other countries, collapsing the price, so the more traditional methods used in Colombia are no longer as competitive and the land and workers are suffering, but that is the nature of comparative advantage; don't spell Colombia with a "U", or you look like an idiot.