DK (that’d Dave for those of you who don’t know him by “DK”), that slut!
Dave left this morning, his flight was pretty early in the morning and I think had woken me up to say “goodbye” but honestly, I don’t/didn’t remember it.
As I mentioned in the last post in the last two days now we’d lost Marie, Pia, Caro and now Dave. So, it was just Devi and I and our plan was to continue traveling on together. But, before we were to leave Bogota there was one last thing I wanted to check out, the Museo de Oro (Gold Museum). I have to be honest, I wasn’t really that interested in it but I’d heard from a few people, including Dave, that it was worth checking out.
This was some creepy room in the museum that was filled with gold trinkets…
After the museum our plan was to head to El Desierto de Tatacoa which is a “desert” just outside of Villavieja, south of Bogota. We didn’t really know how to get there or what we would do once we were there but we were going to go for it anyways.
I can’t recall too much from our bus trip except for the fact that our bus was awful. It had no air conditioning and their were bugs perhaps sand flies, not really sure what they were but it was annoying as hell.
We had heard that once the bus stops in Nieva we’d then have to catch a collectivo (or a smaller bus) to viellavieja and then from there a moto-taxi into the desert. We’d also heard that the collectivo’s don’t run too late to viellavieja and even if you make it, it’s even harder to find a moto-taxi at that point to take you into the desert. But, it just happened that luck was in our favor.
We arrived in Nieva and after asking a policemen what we needed to do he flagged down a collectivo for us that was just leaving for Villavieja. The driver was in no hurry so we went a roundabout way to get there through Nieva which looked pretty crummy, so I was glad not to be spending the night there. This of course would lead us into the second of the proported dilemmas, getting from Villavieja into Tatacoa. Well, as it turns out the driver of our collectivo knew one of the moto-taxi fellows, who was also a guide of the area, and called him up. So, when we actually arrived in Villavieja we had a ride waiting for us to take us into the desert.
Our driver and guide, Chopo, waited for us while we ate some food and then promptly drove us out to where we would be staying.
Our chariot awaits...
It was dark by this point so we really had no idea what the landscape looked like. It was actually pretty cool going into it like that. That way, when we woke up we’d get to see it in first light and take it all in.
Once we made it to the cabin we’d be staying at Chopo convinced us that it’d be good idea to hire him as our own personal guide for the coming day. We negotiated a good deal with him which included our ride out to the desert, a day full of hiking in the desert and a ride back to Villavieja the following day.
