Pasto

From Popayan we had yet another hair raising journey to our last stop in Columbia, the city of Pasto. Apparently it gets a rather hard time from the rest of Columbia, the residents finding themselves the butt of many a joke. We found it quite a pleasant place to stay, if slightly Bridgwater-like in appearance (with the addition of some lovely churches of course). The weather was also almost always cold, blustery and raining, and apparently it is all year round. It made us feel right at home.

Our hostel was the tatty but nice Koala Inn. Here's Clair demonstrating of just how chilly she thought the place was by wearing my fleece as a pair of trousers.


It was a large old building with 3 floors around an internal courtyard. The only downside was we had no natural light in our room. Fortunately we had a TV with cable, so we got to watch House and CSI, and that definitely made up for it. I didn't realise I was in this shot, so didn't switch off my accidental 'I look really grumpy even though I'm not' face.


I have to say that the dining options were a tiny bit limited in simple Pasto. After traipsing around for a while on our first night, we eventually settled upon a Parilla restaurant called ChipiChapi (great name for an British fish and chip restaurant we thought!). This is an Argentine style grill where its pretty much large slabs of meat and not much else on offer. Poor Clairy had a rather wet salad consisting of mainly iceberg lettuce and rice. I, on the other hand, had a gurt steak on a table top griddle that continued to spit all over the place after being placed in front of me. That wasn't the best part though. I had a total of 8...yes 8 different types of carbohydrates to go with it. I had chips, boiled potatos, 2 type of maize fritters, yucca fritters, plantain, rice and popcorn! Not a hint of greenery, luscious!

The main plaza had this excellent statue of a man flashing. I'm sure there was some significance to his pose, but as usual it was entirely lost on us and we just tittered away.


Nice mahoosive date palms in the plaza. We also liked the circle of shoe-shiners underneath who made good use of it's umbrella-like potential.


One of the pretty churches that I can't remember the name of.


And another. This one had beautiful stained glass windows inside.


On our various soggy walks around the city we game across the vast Carnival plaza, where the locals celebrate various festivities throughout the year. One of the more bizarre sounding ones was the festival de Negro y Blanco. This is a throwback to the days of slavery when on one weekend of the year, the slave owners would paint their faces black. Then on the following day the slaves would paint their faces white...and it is still celebrated today in a very messy style!

We also found in the square this kind of sub-Frank Gehry building which provided us with some amusement until we realised it was full of police. Thankfully it wasn't a mirror they could see through.


The town also had nearly as many bakeries as Newton Abbot. They all had the most incredible displays of day-glo spray-on iced cakes that looked rock hard.


Another town full of 'Lentil' cars (thats a renault 4 to anyone else).


We had some beautiful sunsets when it wasn't raining. More clouds for you Fenner!