Surrounded by mountains amist a beautiful town

Trip Start Jan 12, 2008
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Trip End Jan 15, 2009


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Flag of Colombia  ,
Sunday, June 1, 2008

 We have decided that when travelling by bus in Colombia you must add at least 2 hours to any time frame they give you.  Suprisingly the buses tend to leave on time but getting to the other end on time is a different matter.  We left Santa Marta on a 9 hour bus trip run with Brasilia bus lines, heading to Bucarramanga.  The buses here really are first class, airconditioned, soft large chairs and room for Joes legs (this is a big thing in central and south america), so travelling here really is comfie.  My only gripe being the earblasting colombian music they play for the WHOLE TRIP.  When i say whole trip, i mean whole trip, even over the top of the movies they play.  Anyway as i said earlier the 9 hour trip grew to 11 hours by the time we arrived in Bucaramanga. Our final destination was not here however, we headed to the beautiful, charming colonial town of Giron. I am guessing that when people think of South America and Central America they would not think that so many towns looked European 01 Giron - One of the centre parks
01 Giron - One of the centre parks
 . This gorgeous little town is set at the base of some very large mountain ranges and its buildings are white washed and old. The cobblestone streets make for a perfect romantic atmosphere.  We got here late into the night (8pm) and yes we are turning into grannies.  We got some dinner and had a little walk around, in time to see a wedding in a beautiful old church, the well looked after chubby street dogs, the tiny rat dog that was so excited it literally jumped in the air with every step and the hoardes of families with young children playing in the park.

Our hotel had the most comfie bed we have had in a few weeks, so a you can imagine we both slept well.  We leisurly made our way down to a panaderia (bakery) around 9am for breakfast (it is a hard life).  Crossaints and caramel cake scrolls all around, we were suitably impressed by our chosen breakfast spot -  A little park framed to the north by a quant little old church which in turn was framed by massive sound of music style mountains.  Quite a picturesque breakfast, wouldnt you say?  We spent the morning strolling the cobblestone streets, doing the tourist thing, happy snapping!!  We made our way to a juice bar and got ourselves some excellent passionfruit and a piņa and fresa juice.  YUMMO. Joe was asking about one of the fruits writen up on the board called Guanaba which they were surprised we didnt know of. They showed us some cut up stuff and told us it was a huge fruit, the size of a watermelon, but they didnt have a whole one to show us 02
02
 . Satisfied with that we sat down to drink our massive juices and a minute later she brought out a free Guanaba smoothy for us to try. We liked it, me more than Joe and decided it tasted a little like custard apples... Our juices were so big that we couldnt finish them all!

Spent the rest of the day hanging around, checking the place out, chilling in the parque central watching Colombian life and got a great late lunch on the balcony of an old building over looking the central square.

Anyhow... We left Giron around 7:00pm to go to the terminal to catch a night bus through to Bogota.
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