Villa de Leyva Is a Delight

Villa de Leyva is a delight.  Set out on a grid pattern like just about everywhere else here and low level with virtually nothing bar the church in the Playa Mayor rising over two stories.   Our arrival was just before the end of high season although it still looked fairly empty on Saturday evening.   By Monday it was decidedly emptier.   The streets are narrow in the centre, perhaps 25 feet wide with the buildings flush to the road.  All the roads are cobbled with very rounded, ankle breaking rocks but we still saw some younger women stumbling about in fashionable shoes.   The centre is a bit touristy but still has many cafes and shops for locals and certainly isn’t tarted up for tourists.   Actually at a week into our trip we’ve noticed the lack of tourists.  There are Columbians out from Bogota and we’ve met a surprising number of Columbians who live abroad and who are visiting home.   The lack of tourists probably accounts for the few Columbians who speak any English at all and that includes almost all hotel staff.

The Playa Mayor is surrounded by the two storey buildings, many of which still have flashing Christmas lights on them in mid-January, with the church set on the north-eastern side also with flashing lights.   The square is impressive and at 120 metres along each side is apparently one of the largest in the Americas.   What makes it look even bigger is that apart from a small fountain it is completely empty, no trees, no café tables spilling onto it, no statues.   Quite a sight.

Dozing in the hammock outside our room I registered that Heather was talking to an Englishman, opened my eyes and got introduced.   James, for that was his name, said that he had just got married in Columbia.  Standing just behind him was a distinguished looking Columbian chap.  Well, I thought, Columbia as a definite Roman Catholic country was very enlightened to be having gay marriages and was just about to say so when something, I don’t know what, stayed my tongue.   I’d missed the bride as I dozed and the Columbian was the hotel owner.  

When we left after three days we had an interesting travelling day ahead which included three separate bus rides and a taxi shuttle from one bus station to another.  This wasn’t our plan.  We’d bought a ticket for the last leg of the journey and after ten minutes or so the ticket office man came out and showed us to a taxi.  This just shuttled us across town to catch the bus.   At one of the earlier stops I’d headed into town because I had to make a deposit payment via bank transfer for our Amazon trip.  It was one of those great moments, heading into an unknown town without a map, looking for a branch of a specific  bank to pay a lot of money to someone I don’t know and not speaking Spanish.  What could possibly go wrong?   Well, I found the bank OK but no-one, staff or customers could speak any English, which to be fair was only a minor problem.  The real problem was that the bloody computer system wasn’t working. 

I’d left Heather with all the bags at the bus station where on arrival we’d been approached by a Columbian woman speaking fair English.  Naturally we grabbed all our bags, as if this small, limping woman was going to wrest them by force from us and make off without us being able to catch her.   These terrible suspicions fed by the few bad publicised incidents overwhelm the many more good unpublicised incidents.   Turned out she was of course only trying to be helpful.   Sonja (a good traditional Columbian name) had lived in Birmingham and was a Child Psychologist specialising in Autism, so I guess the nuance of language barrier wasn’t such a problem with her caseload.   Anyway she now lived in Prague with her husband, a Computer Programmer working for Barclays.   She insisted that we had her phone number in case we need any assistance while in Columbia and also an invitation to stay with her and her mother.  

At our Bogota hotel we’d met two women from Chicago who were just leaving but had spent months planning their month long trip while we of course restrict our planning to a return air ticket and the first couple of nights in a hotel.   The rest just happens.  At the end of our three bus and taxi day we were collecting our bags from the back and at that point just walking past were the two Chicagoans.   This town, Barichara is a scenic beauty too, beloved of atmospheric film makers who want the classic sleepy colonial Spanish town shots.  Being hillier than Villa de Leyva meant that views were better as the carreras and calles (just roads, but carreras run one way and calles are at right angles to the carreras) opened up to distant views.  We’d been losing altitude since Bogota and it was getting noticeably hotter and was now much more so than a pleasant English summer.  About gas mark meditteranean, I’d say and we’re still at 4,500 feet.

This town is the centre of the ant-eating region, an acquired taste which I have no likelihood of even attempting to acquire.  I even passed up the chance of fillet steak with an ant sauce.  In any case, there isn’t much meat on an ant, not even a leg.   A couple of other food oddities we’ve seen and tried were garlic bread with cream and jam, not as bad as it sounds and potato soup with breakfast, which had large pieces of potato flavoured with coriander and was very tasty.   We did get a flyer handed to us in one place for a four course lunch plus a drink for the equivalent of about £3 ($5) and the main dish was horse steak.  We tend not to eat much at lunchtime, otherwise we still wouldn’t have had it.   

While in Barichara we walked a wonderful ancient stone path which was mostly downhill and 6 miles or so to a neighbouring village.  A bus brings you back but we missed it so it was a drink and a sit in the shade in this classic one-horse town where the horse has died.   Eventually a collectivo (shared taxi) arrived and I rounded up seven of us at 4,000 pesos each (£1.50/$2) to share it back to Barichara.  That’s two Brits, two norte americanas and three young Uruguayans.   One of the Uruguayans thought Columbia was much more dangerous than Uruguay and was quite livid about being ripped off by a taxi driver in Bogota “and we speak the language” he said with almost audible exclamation marks.