Sleeping in a tent when you're freezing cold is not fun :(

What was supposed to be an easy hour drive into Bogota to find the YWAM base for us to stay at or a place to stay at landed up being quite a crazy day. First of all we landed up driving closer to like 10 hours!!! We spent some time in the city trying to figure out what to do, the YWAM base turned out not to be such a great option (expensive and logistically challenging with no nearby parking amongst other things) so we decided to drive an hour outside the city to camp up the mountain. This proved to not be such a good idea as the place we'd found was more of a family farm rather than a campsite with not enough space for us. We had to do two extremely tight hairpin turns to get into the garden (particularly challenging when one is pulling a large trailor). We unfortunately ruined part of the family's grass trying to get our vehicles in, only to not stay there (just not big enough for us) so after all that we turned around and headed back down the mountain. 

We landed up camping in the courtyard of a restaurant. So NY for us was spaghetti bolognaise cooked in the campers, camping and enjoying watching the fireworks over the city. Some of the challenges for the day included Open Heaven (our really big camper van) driving into a horse buggy, driving into a parked car while getting out of the McDonald's parking lot (it can be really hard to maneuver a car this big in a city) and smashing it's large side window when it accidentally drove into a fence. It's a challenge having 4 such ridiculously large awkwardly long vehicles!!! Plus our pop up trailer finally broke (only one side winds up) so out with my tent...

Open Heaven's broken window...

Bogota is freezing. Warm during the day but freezing during the night. We all wore everything we owned for the evening which was ok, but the night was terrible, i was so cold I couldn't sleep, spent the whole night shivering thinking this sucks!!! It's kinda weird being sunburnt cos the sun is very intense during the day, but then the night is so cold. It's so beautiful staying up the mountain though as we look out over the city. Bogota is massive, we can see miles and miles of big buildings making up the city, but it's apparently only about 20% of the city, which has about 10 million people. Kind of interesting when I remember that the whole country of Belize only had about 330,000 people.

Sunday we drove a few metres down the road to have breakfast at a traditional restaurant. It was so amazing, having a team breakfast followed by team time praying for each other and discussing the next few days. Breakfast was yummy, finished off with a plantain leaf with salsa, guacamole and cheese. Yummy. The restaurant owners were so friendly and welcoming.

New Year's breakfast

Plantain leaf with salsa, guacamole and cheese

We have been so blessed to find an abandoned restaurant for rent/sale to sleep in. $5 a night and a roof over our heads. What more could we want! Unfortunately we have no showers, so we'll have to bucket bath, which is ok except that the water is freezing and it's super cold outside to. Oh well. I'm wondering how many days I can deal without being able to shower...

Bar/restaurant we stayed in

Sleeping around the central bar

Sunday we were blessed with an amazing meal at the restaurant for half the normal price. Cherry and lemon juice, and a hot plate of 4 pieces of different meat (chicken, steak, pork and a sausage), jacket potato with sour cream and roasted vegetables. All this for only $5. Oh my goodness, these people are just too lovely to us. We'll be staying here for 4 nights before we head towards the town of Cali. It's great to be camping in one spot as we finally have the time now to do some ministry.