Villa De Leyva and Baby’s 1st Tejo Game

After being sick and alone for a week, I was eager to get back to the stuff of life.

I thanked San Gil for being my home as I healed, and headed to Villa De Leyva, further south towards Bogota. Villa De Leyva is renowned for being one of the best preserved colonial towns in Colombia. When I arrived and walked the cobble stone streets, there was definitely a very Spanish feel to the town.

The hostel I stayed at in Villa is called Hostel Alfondoque, named after a typical sweet from the region. It had several reviews on Hostel World where people cited the friendly environment, which was just what I was looking for as I rebounded back from the flu.

The owners of Alfondonque are two Colombian brothers from nearby Tunja, Nico and Santi. They opened up the hostel about a month ago as a new business, and a venture into which they were putting a lot of energy. It was clear from their welcoming greeting and their offers to show me around town, and the happiness and comfort of the other guests, that the reviews i’d read were spot-on.

My first full day in Villa I walked outside the city center to go visit the Casa De Barro, which is a terra cotta house that was designed and built by this artist with a very Tim Burton-esque style. The place is weirdly creepy and alluring at the same time. The place is made of beautiful clay that is visibly hand molded, with all kinds of benches and little nooks and crannies carved into the clay walls. There were all these awesomely bizarre metal animals throughout the house as well.

pelican lamp

the workshop

Later that afternoon I went on a hike that the youngest of the brothers of Alfondonque, Nico, recommended for its sweet view of the city and the sunset. I managed to scoop up the company of another German guy who had just arrived at the hostel that afternoon. It felt so good to climb the steep hillside, working up a bit of a sweat. Though I had to stop several times to catch my breath, my body felt stronger than it had in days. It’s an amazing thing, the resilience of the human body.

The German guy from the hike along with a young Australian woman who was staying at the hostel too, ended up being my companions for dinner that evening as well as for adventuring around the next day. It was comforting to be in the company of others even if they weren’t people I was necessarily super excited about, or even really interested in staying in touch with. The companionship of these fellow travelers was still very much appreciated.

We went on a lovely hike the following day and played in a few different waterfalls along the way.

My last night in Villa the brothers organized an outing to go play Tejo, the national sport of Colombia. I’d missed a chance to play Tejo when I was sick in San Gil, but had watched a YouTube video about the game that got me real excited about it. So I was jazzed to say the least.

Tejo is like an amped-up version of corn-hole, if that means anything new to you. The game involves lobbing these heavy metal discs across a long narrow court at a slab of clay embedded in a large wooden wedge. The game is named for the metal discs that each player uses to try and gain points for their team. The aim is to get your tejo as close to the center of the goal as possible, which is marked by a metal ring imbedded in the clay. If you land your tejo within the metal ring you get six points. If you land your tejo close to the perimeter of the ring you get one point. If you land your tejo on one of the four small paper triangles filled with gunpowder that mark the cardinal directions along the circle, you make a loud explosion, get 3 points and mad props.

When you go to a tejo bar, you don’t pay for the court or the tejo, you pay for the beers or bottle of rum that you will drink as you play. As you can imagine the game can get pretty heated.

There is a professional tejo league in Colombia. The guy running thetTejo bar we went to in Villa used to be a pro player and he showed us the size of the tejo he would play with– it’s twice the size and weight of the tejos we used. The pros also play on a court that’s twice the length of the court we played on. Pretty impressive!

After several rounds of drinks and tejo, the game began to slow down as people’s aim worsened and their alcohol-induced need to express some strong-held opinions deepened. The game devolved into various constellations of people standing around the tejo court talking. But how glorious it was as we played. Quite a…blast!

Aside from the lovely hikes and tejo courts, another major attraction of Villa is its archeological and paleontological scene. The whole area used to be under water thousands of years ago and the seas that once covered the land left behind a wealth of dope fossils and bones when they dried up. There is an institute for the study of paleontology in Villa, which is the first of its kind in Colombia, and offers a cool tour of the various specimens they’ve collected. They have some pretty high quality Ichthyasaurus skeletons.

oldest sea turtle yet found on earth

Also, we found a few fossils of our own on our hike to the waterfalls!

Plus the paleontology institute has this hilarious mural of the famous Colombian scientists that helped make the institute a reality. Look how happy and sexy all these paleontologists are!