Back to Bogota after the Amazon was a bit of culture shock. Once again, we bumped into Mike (getting a bit freaky now), and had a night out in the Zona Rosa, where there are just bars and more bars. Not a patch on Buenos Aires but kind of good to have a cold beer in our hand again.

We´ve had a bit of museum time here. First, the Police museum where Colombian men who speak English can choose to be a tour guide as part of their military service. The two of us were shown around by a lovely guy whose English was kind of hard to understand but we were his first English tour and he was kind of nervous and desperate to keep us happy that we nodded and made lots of ah, si, si noises as we were shown around various historical exhibits, including lots of photos of dead cartel members, including Pablo Escobar, Medellin drug baron, who apparently was so rich that he built his own prison and subsequently, (and understandably given he built it), managed to escape from. We thought this was an odd bit of info for the police to include in their tour?! The tour guide also made lots of references to killing members of the Medellin and Cali Cartels without so much emphasis on bringing them to justice. They also have a collection of English police badges, some a little out of date, although the fact that Herefordshire and Worcestershire no longer had individual police forces seemed lost on our guide.

Brightened by our personal tour guide experience we took a day trip to Zipaquera, a nearby town with a massive salt mine which also contains a cathedral within the mine. We spent two hours walking underground in the cool darkness. No such luck of having a personal guide this time though, we were with about 40 other Spanish speaking tourists being shown essentially a lot of crosses carved into the walls of the mine. Our Spanish really doesn´t cover the technical language of mining and religion just yet so we pretty much just skulked about at the back.

A trip up to another church by funicular this morning, with views over the city which are pretty spectacular. The other side of the hill is completely pristine forest. We finished our glut of Bogota museums with an afternoon in the gold museum today. A professional museum with thousands of pieces of gold from across South America. Impressive stuff with security to match, the doors to the museum were 5 feet thick, bank safe style. I managed not to set the alarms of this time as I managed to do as I got a little too close to a Picasso in a previous museum. oops.

La Candelaria where we´re staying is a cosy kind of narrow street, university area with lots of good food, some live music and although it´s probably not somewhere we´ll come back to, it´s been a good few days.