Fossils and small travel obstacles

Sometimes, if a place has come too highly recommended, if expectations are too high, it cannot but disappoint at least a little. Thus it has been with Villa de Leyva for us. It is – and there is no doubt whatsoever – a beautiful town,

our accommodation very nice, its people as friendly as anywhere. Nothing major happened, only several small incidences, no more than circumstances beyond anyone's control, really, that marred the experience here a little. It started with the difficulty of finding our accommodation the first day, the cold water where we expected it to be hot, and a disappointment first, an anxious hour later yesterday.

We had added an extra day here to go to Ráquira, a small town about 25 km away, famous for its pottery and colourful houses. We had planned to see the town and maybe walk a few kilometres to visit the Monasterio de la Candelaria, the oldest Augustine monastery in the Americas.

The bus station was uncharacteristically quiet when we got there, hardly anyone around. No people milling about, no shouts for different locations, only one man who asked us if we wanted to go to Bogotá, which we didn't, of course. We asked about the bus to Ráquira and were told there were none today because of the Paro Nacional. We had been warned to stay out of Bogotá on this national day of peaceful protest, an annual occurrence, because of the marches that would shut down many areas of the city, but had not expected this to extend into the country. 

 

Too bad; I had quite looked forward to our excursion. But it was not a disaster either: we decided to walk to the Museo El Fósil, not far from Sol Muisca which we had visited the day before. This time we followed the highway all the way to the turnoff to the museum, a less dusty option, but the one with a bit more traffic, of course. This whole area had been known to be very rich in fossils, but the find of a largely complete 'Kronosaurus' (a crocodile-like reptile) by a local peasant in 1977 was extraordinary. At about 9m in length it is the biggest fossil found in Colombia. The Museo El Fósil was built around it, starting with this one room, by now with the addition of another with fossils of ichtyosaurs and plesiosaurs, turtles and a lot of ammonites and shells. Information is in Spanish and English. It is a community museum, and people in the whole area are involved in this project and rightly proud of their efforts. More rooms are being added and will soon be ready to house a bigger collection. 

 

We didn't go back down to the highway to visit the CIP – Centro de Investigaciones Paleaontológicas (Paleontological Investigation Centre) – which holds one of the most advanced laboratories in Latin America for preparation of vertebrate fossils, which certainly would have been very interesting as well.

Instead we turned back towards Villa de Leyva after stopping at a small restaurant, continuing on the dusty road that led up to the museum after we had made sure that it would lead us back to town. This it did, and once again we passed the Austrian's property, this time coming from the other side, and saw that the load of rocks he had been expecting yesterday had indeed arrived.

The hour of (some) anxiety I referred to earlier came late in the afternoon when Johann read that there were no busses from Tunja – the bigger town we have to get back to to get anywhere from Villa de Leyva – to San Gil, our next destination. We had counted on the connection, Johann had read about it before, but now we could find no confirmation that there was one. The options we seemed to have were very unappealing: either to go back to Bogotá and take a bus from there – more than ten hours – or go to Bucaramanga, a major city north of San Gil, and reach San Gil from there, which would have been about eight hours.

We decided to try and see if the tourist information near the Plaza Mayor was open and hopefully get some reliable information there. On the way we reasoned that even if there wasn't a direct bus from Tunja we certainly should be able to take a succession of small busses to go to San Gil. The other two prospects seemed highly unlikely to apply to the local population, with so many small busses and collectivos in use. What we found out at the tourist information was even better, however: we were assured that busses run regularly, every fifteen minutes or so, from here to Tunja, and just as regularly from Tunja directly to San Gil. Big relief! The prospect of spending a whole day on busses had dampened our spirits a little.

I'm not sure we would want to go to Bogotá right now: I just read that yesterday's protests, which were supposed to be peaceful, had been disrupted by vandals, so that violence erupted in several places and the anti-riot police had stepped in. The article said that this had been very localized, but still, I'm glad we were far away. Will this be the beginning of more unsettled conditions here now as well? I'm not worried about safety on this trip, but looking into the future south and central America might not remain the desirable travel destinations for us they have been for the past ten years.