Catedral del Sal

We woke up a little late since we had stayed up until 1:00am and I had tossed and turned most of the night. After our usual breakfast of oatmeal and fruit, we headed to the Museo del Oro bus stop to catch the bus all the way to its North terminal. Once we reached the end of the bus route, we got off and looked for the buses that would take us to Zipaquira. Luckily one of the bus workers saw our confusion and pointed out the bus we needed to get on. This bus was decorated with Middle Eastern and religious flair which we found hilarious.

It was about an hour bus ride to Zipaquira and once we arrived, the bus driver tried to point us in the direction of the Catedral del Sal, but as we walked through town we still ended up lost and needed to ask for directions.

Once we arrived at the cathedral, we had to pick the tour package that we were going to do. The packages were all in Spanish of course and there were some words we weren't familiar with so we made an educated guess. As we entered the mine, we were surprised to see elaborate light displays. Clearly a lot of renovations had been done in the name of tourism.

First, we walked through each of the stations of the cross. The salt mine had a cathedral added inside in the 90's and actually it was quite extensive. Each station of the cross was inside of a mining cavern and had its own unique stone cross beautifully lit. We couldn't understand a lot of what our tour guide said in Spanish but luckily there was a girl from Ecuador on the tour who spoke wonderful English and one she saw our confused looks she began to translate for us.

The cross in the picture below is the largest underground cross in the world. As it turns out, it is actually a hole in the rock wall in the shape of a cross not a giant stone cross which it initially looked like.

The current chapel below is a recreation of the one the miners had back in the 1800's. The old one had to be abandoned because the part of the mine became structurally unsound.

The picture below shows a giant salt waterfall. The salt is actually concentrated in all of the rock within the cave but when water leaches through the rock, it brings the salt to the surface as seen here. Alyssa and I would often taste the rock to see if it tasted like salt- which it did!

As we progressed to the end of the tour, we were disappointed to see how touristy they had made it. It was like being in Disneyland and they were trying to sell all sorts of memorabilia and jewelry. A that point, we were both a little disillusioned by the whole thing.

As part of our package, we had signed up for the "miners experience" where we donned hard hats and walked through the mines in the dark as the miners in the 1800's had done.

We also got to try our hand at mining with a pick axe. I didn't expect the rock to be so hard- we could hardly make a dent! Apparently as they continue to go deeper and deeper with the mine, the rock gets harder and so they rely exclusively on explosives now to mine the salt.

After our mining experience, we had lunch in the town. We were trying to find something relatively healthy and stumbled upon a shwarma place. I figured why not give it a shot. As with everything, we are thinking like Americans and expected our version of shwarma. What we got was a steak burrito. What they called tahini was definitely mayonnaise and the lettuce, tomatoes and onion that were described on the menu had been grilled with the steak and were barely able to be recognized as vegetables anymore. Oh well, we tried. We walked in the direction of the street we had come in on and luckily a guy was yelling from outside of a bus, asking if we were headed to Bogota. We said yes and literally had to jump aboard an already moving bus. This bus took much longer to get back to town as they did not take the freeway and made tons of stops in the little towns to pick up/drop off people (probably because it was rush hour). We finally made it back to our bus stop and took the mainline buses back to our hostel. The hostel was having a big party for Friday night but we had no interest in going. The boys kept coming downstairs to try and entice us up to the party but we would not leave our bed. Instead we made a fruit salad with the weird local fruits that we hadn't tried yet. Granadilla is the one that looks like eyeballs, the red ones are like a plum crossed ith a cherry and the speckled fruit we later found out is a laxative. Cheers to trying new things!

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