Our Great Adventure: San Gil Day 316 31/07/2015

We had breakfast, packed and checked out of the San Antonio. It's a lovely hotel, another one set around a courtyard, but a bit formal and stuffy. They probably don't get many travellers like us staying there! We walked to bus station and got a local minibus to Tunja, back on the main highway from Bogota to Santa Marta, where we needed to get a connecting bus to San Gil, our next destination. We arrived in Tunja just before 1030 to the usual reception. Everyone is really helpful but sometimes it's a bit disconcerting as you don't know who they are and where they are trying to take you! Lucky for us, the lady in the office next to the Berlinas desk asked where we wanted to go and shouted out of the window to a bus driver. A guy ran upstairs to help with our bags, sold us two tickets and off we went. The bus was heading to Cucuta on the border with Venezuela, about 14 hours north east of Tunja. We were glad we weren't going that far. The roads as we left Tunja were pretty horrendous and we bounced and rolled along, suffering a little bit from the 4 hour bike ride yesterday. After a few hours we had the customary lunch stop where we bought empanadas and some type of fried corn bread. Neither were particularly appetising and we certainly won't miss the lunch breaks on the long bus journeys. We arrived in San Gil just after 1500. We bought our onward tickets to Santa Marta, what will no doubt be a joyous 12 hour overnight bus journey on Sunday, before getting a taxi the short distance to the hostel we'd booked for the next two nights. The choice of accomodation was particularing limited and we opted for what looked like the best of not a very good bunch, the Santander Aleman Terrace Vista Hostel near to the local bus terminal. It's OK, clean and we've got a private bathroom. It doesn't have air conditioning which might make for an interesting night given how warm it is here. You can certainly tell the difference in temperature as we've continued to drop in altitude and are now at 1100m. We had a wandered around the town looking at options for the next two days before stopping at Gringo Mike's for refreshments. San Gil is renown for it's adventure activities and we decided to go white water rafting tomorrow, opting for the easier grade 3 route and booked it with the hostel. Diane wasn't keen (bluntly refused!) on the harder grade 5 option having never rafted before. In the evening we went to El Mana for dinner. It was an interesting experience especially since they only did 'dish of the day' and didn't have a menu. We were quite impressed that we got what we thought we'd ordered (thanks to Simon's spanish). We wandered back to our hostel and rather warm room wondering what time the traffic outside would quieten down.