Manizales

After checking out of our hostel in Salento we headed to the bus stop to board our bus to Manizales via a change at Pereira. It was a relatively short journey meandering through the hills which took around two and a half hours.

We arrived at Manizales a medium sized city of around 500k people in the afternoon. The city itself is splattered around a number of hills with 2 cable cars running through the city to help its occupants get around. Although Manizales was on our list of places to visit, our actual stay is in a small bed and breakfast positioned up on the hills in a small village called Morrogacho. The B&B is based beautifully on the hillside with incredible views and a well manicured garden. We were greeted by the owner and his three dogs who kept us company during the whole stay.

We originally had only planned to stay two nights in Manizales, but after seeing how beautiful it was and how close we were to the Los Nevados National Park we extended our trip to four nights to cram an excursion in.

On our first day in Manizales we caught one of the many buses to the cable car terminal.The cable car runs from the terminal to the main plaza, at the top we explored what Manizales had to offer, walking up the plaza and around the cathedral square.

We eventually ended up walking to a hill with a monument to defeating the Spanish colonisers with incredible views all around. We decided to grab some lunch at a restaurant which unbeknown to us didn’t use menu’s. Whilst the waitress was very kind in slowly explaining to us in Spanish the offerings we still got very confused and didn’t really know what we ordered other than it potentially being the plate of the day. What came out was a great ensemble of trout , rice , beans and plantain which went down a treat. I think the meal came to around 42,000 pesos for a soup starter, a main and a drink each. Which works out to be around £8.50 in total for the two meals.

After the meal we grabbed a taxi to termales el otoño a fancy hotel up in the hills which has a thermal spa and swimming pools with the heat of the water coming from hot springs located not too far away. Whilst we were there it began to rain quite heavily as it is the rainy season at the moment in Colombia. I don’t think there’s anywhere better to be when it rains than in a hot bath.

The next day we spent relaxing around the b&b whilst trying to organise the next few weeks of our trip along side finding a guide to take us into Los Nevados National Park the following day to explore the hot springs from source and also to see the volcano and its glaicier. I’ll expand more on our day trip into the national park in my next post