Blogs :: a weekday getaway: Villa de Leyva

a weekday getaway: Villa de Leyva

continued from "a weekday getaway: Tunja"...

With buses and Tunja having taken up most of our day, we arrived Wednesday evening in Villa de Leyva, a small colonial town turned national monument, and one of the nicest colonial towns I've seen.

As the Lonely Planet states, it's "a popular weekend getaway" for the citizens of Bogota. Hence, tourist boom, and all the wonderful goodness that comes with it. Cha-ching! Ah well. Tourist prices are of course an inevitability. It's not so bad, as long as they're worth it. Villa de Leyva was a mixed bag in this respect.

Daylight having faded, and us following suit, we grabbed a hotel. Generous Brendon offered me the full size bed, while he took the twin, because at home, I'm on the pullout sofa. In all my thanks, I did not notice that my bed was essentially a giant, cushionless rock with sheets on it, while the twin, while small, had one of those fancy "mattress" things on it. Damn.

Whatever. Dinner then bed. I had seen this restaurant that had the promising words "The Beer Factory" in it's name, so we went there. It was...disappointing, as Brendon clearly demonstrates in the following video.

Overpriced and under-delicious. Sigh. Time to go Fred Flintstone and sleep on my rock. What followed was one of my top five worst night's sleep ever. Skipping details, let me just say that mosquitoes are one of the greatest evils in this world.

Morning, glorious morning came and we rented a taxi-truck to take us around to some of the nearby sights. There was El Fósil, a large kronosaurus fossil...

El Infiernito, Spanish for "little hell", an archeological site known for its' many "large phallic stone monoliths" (which had we read before visiting might have changed our expectations and resulted in a far less hilarious stop)...

Convento del Santo Ecce Homo, a convent and church with a beautiful garden with some museum-like displays...

And lastly the Ostrich Farm, where you could get up close and personal with the birds.

I could not make myself forget the fact that they are descendants of velociraptors, and so kept my distance, while Brendon on the other hand had to get in their face and trash-talk them.

My belief that ostriches on farms are not necessarily tame seems true (another example of something you could never get away with in the USA), though Brendon's verbal abuse in a faux Australian accent could not provoke them to attack. After the tour, we ate ostriches burgers in their restaurant (our hopes of being able to go "That one!" and pick our meal from the pen were tragically dashed).

After finishing our tourism of the surrounding area, we decided to try a new hotel, resulting in much nicer rooms for five bucks cheaper. The night concluded with a successful second attempt at Mexican food, and closing out a bar with some new-found local friends who were singing, surprisingly well (audio clip below), and some of the accursed aguardiente.

Villa de Leyva, drinks, churches, tours, lodging, food, Colombia, animals