Mount Monserrate and off to Medellin

Up early, about 7:30 and had breakfast at the hostel at 8:00. Yesterday we decided to do Mount Monserrate and the Gold Museum (Museo del Oro) in the morning, then take a bus to Medellin. We walked to the base of Monseratte and got our tickets for the ride up, via a funicular (cable pulled train car type of deal). The views were pretty great, but amazingly spectacular. At the top of the mountain, theres a restaurant and a church.

The cable car doesn't start operating until noon, so we took the funicular back down and headed off to the Museo del Oro. On the way there dad managed to get a SIM card for his phone/wifi hotspot, so he's internet enabled now. We got to the museum only to find out that it's closed on Mondays. Oh well!

I must say, Bogota is not quite what I expected. It's the third largest city in the western hemisphere (according to what Ryan read on the internets) which surprised me. It's doesn't have the feeling of a typical capital city, though, there are really no touts and hawkers about trying to forever sell you stuff, which is nice.

We stopped at a market and I bought a wineskin to use a water bottle and Ryan bought some things for his kids.

We went to a restaurant and had a Columbain traditional dish of yesterdays leftovers, although this guy claimed they didn't reheat the leftovers from yesterday, instead they reheated the food they made earlier in the morning.

We headed back to the hostel and got a taxi to the bus terminal and got our tickets to Medellin, about 60,000 pesos each. We had about an hour wait for the bus. It was a super nice bus, it even had wi-fi and charging stations on the bus! The bus left at 2:45.

We stopped for supper around 8:00ish. Remember Ryan getting scared by a big beetle in the sink in the washrooms at the restaurant.

The drive was pretty spectacular, especially heading into Medellin. It's more tropical (being lower elevation), and it was storming really hard, so there was all kinds of massive waterfalls along the side of the highway. I was really disappointed that it was late at night and I couldn't see much, as it looked like it would have been pretty spectacular.

We got the hostel about 1:00am. I went to bed first, I had just a sheet on my bed, which was fine, it was quite warm. Ryan was next to climb into bed and he didn't even have a sheet. He had to use his sleeping bag. Dad was last (as he had to fix his spreadsheets), and he had only a comforter, not a sheet. Haha.