Viaje grande de Lesa y Gianni: Taganga to Bucaramanga and beyond

Taganga

After Cartagena we decided to continue along the Carribean coast to a tiny fishing town called Taganga for Gio to finally get under the water and do some diving. We found a great little hotel, surprising in such a small town, that had a pool.

Although we quickly discovered that even though they had a pool they still managed to run out of water for everything else daily, and the electricity was only intermittent!

Studying...

We stayed in Taganga long enough to enjoy some amazing fresh fish and great juices and for Gio to do a couple of dives. However a combination of no electricity (and therefore no fans at night) and lots of very noisy dogs motivated us to make a move to our next stop, Villa Leyva.

Bucaramanga

In order to get to Villa Leyva we needed to break up the journey, so, after 11 hours on the road we stopped in a city called Bucaramanga – yes try saying that after a couple of drinks. We dumped our bags and wandered round the corner for some fast food. I gave up attempting to decipher the menu and ordered something random. It turned out to be a giant pile of potato sticks (these retro crisps)!

With chicken and cheese and some other unidentified vegetables on top!! Still after such a long day it tasted pretty good.

Villa Leyva

We headed to Villa Leyva as we had read it was a beautiful old town with year round spring like weather and plenty of peace and quiet for us to study Spanish. As usual, despite the best of intentions our planned 6 hours study a day didn’t quite work out.

Lesa 'studying' at the hostel

It may also have been linked to the discovery of a French bakery in town! We seemed to find a reason to walk the 15 minutes in to town every day and inevitably end up with cakes in our hands.

'Besos di mi novia' speciality local cakes

So far we have been under the illusion that despite the fact we still struggle stringing a sentence together we understand a lot of spanish. However after helping a little old lady in to town – and listening to her chat enthusiastically to us for about half an hour, we discover this is not the case. Between us we understood about 4 sentences! Mind you – she really didn’t seem to mind that we clearly didn’t have a clue what she was saying!! We understood “tan lindos” – how kind we were! And between us received a lot of kisses.

As usual time passed on without us really knowing what we had been doing with it! We spent six days in Villa Leyva, hired a bike and visited an Ostrich farm..