We arrived relatively early in Bogota (see Villa de Leyva entry), and spent the day wandering around the La Candelaria area of the city which is where the universities are based and which has lots of museums - handy for a day when the rain never stopped. A bargain set menu lunch - soup followed by chicken and rice and potatoes for the princely sum of 2 pounds. Our bargaining skills which have to date been extremely poor, improved slightly when Steve complained about a broken window and shoddy laundry service. 15,000 pesos (3 pounds) knocked off our bill, following a telephone discussion with the owner. Go Steve.

The presidential election in Colombia is on Sunday and the city effectively closes down for the whole weekend. Elections here are pretty different to back home as you can imagine - no alcohol can be sold and shops close early. The media is not allowed to´report on electoral irregularities during this Sunday's presidential elections, without prior confirmation of the news by an official government source´. Apparently it´s going to be a close run thing between two massively different candidates - Santos and Mockus. http://colombiareports.com/colombia-news/2010-elections.html

Only one day in Bogota as we´re off to the Amazon and will explore the capital on our return.

(By the way, the photo above is not one of ours but it did remind me of where our bus stopped for lunch a little while ago. They had no menus so we thought we´d order what a) we could confidently pronounce in Spanish and b)what we thought would be fairly safe in terms of content. well, we got one of those things right- having correctly order our sopa (yep - soup) we were presented with two big bowls of floating meat in a orangey coloured stew. The only thing we´re pretty sure we identified correctly was a set of testicles, belonging to something I guess would be around the size of a goat. Not that we tried it to find out.)