Bogota :: Colombia
Now with added safety!
Places: Bogota.
Coolest thing I did: The most unconventional bike tour I've ever been on, where the guide points out where to buy your mobile phone back from if it gets stolen.
Coolest thing I didn´t know: Shakira is actually of an Lebanese background.
If there's one country in the world that has been in the papers for all the wrong reasons for my entire lifetime it would have to be Colombia. It's endured civil wars, several leftist insurgencies, drug lords, right wing paramilitary death squads and just about every other trapping a semi-failed Latin American state can expect to have. Given the fact the two largest Marxist armed groups until very recently had a lucrative stream of funding kidnapping both rich locals and tourists Colombia was hardly a place people considered a good place for a holiday. That's probably why arriving in Bogota these days feels like you're entering a city that's just woken up after a long coma.
About a decade ago, when the two biggest rebel armies (FARC & ELN) had total control over vast swathes of the country and were levying taxes directly on the narcotraficantes the government decided enough was enough. In the intervening years the numbers of soldiers and police have grown exponentially and speaking to people who were here even three or four years ago the visible police presence in Bogota has made the place feel much safer than I ever did in a big city in Brazil. While this almost certainly came at the cost of civil rights and a lack of due process it's hard to argue with the fact the city has gone from none to about 50 hostels in the space of half a decade. Even though the tourist industry is still mostly older backpackers and low rent coming here wasn't something you would have thought of when cocaine funded violence was the order of the day.
You get the best idea of the scale of the city (a mere 8 million souls) by taking the cable car or funicular (depending on the whim of the drivers that day) up the Cerro de Monserrate and see the city filling the flat plain surrounded on all sides by the Andes. You tend to forget you're over 2000m altitude until you try and climb steps too fast and feel your heart trying to escape your chest between deep panting that seems to resist all attempts to fill your lungs. In an imitation of Rio the slums are starting to escape the plain and are growing steadily up the mountain sides. If you want a 360 degree view there's also the viewing platform of the tallest building in the city, the Torre Colpatria Building which opens up on a Sunday, and which also reproves the cast-iron law that the tallest buildings in any city in the world will probably be owned by a bank or oil company.
I've been strangely drawn to museums here, probably mostly because it's also been cold and raining a fair bit. Due to it's height Bogota seems to be a year round 19 degrees with drizzle, which is a shock when you fly here from Salvador in Brazil and a 7am temperature approaching 28 degrees with 100% humidity. They have a Gold Museum, which is the continent's best collection of pre-Colombian gold, due to the fact the tales of El Dorado (the city of gold) that spawned many of the Spanish conquerors explorations of the interior of South America came from stories told of the Colombian indios being decked out in gold. The museum is modern and tells a good story, but the best bit is the trippy 5 minutes in a dark chamber surrounded by hundreds of gold carvings to the sounds of shamanic chanting and running water. Not sure what that was all about.
There is also a Police Museum, which I'd normally not given a thought to, except for the fact people kept telling me to go there. While the highlight was all the Pablo Escobar paraphernalia (more on him in Medellin), including a blood stained roof tile that was taken from the scene of his untimely demise in a hail of bullets, the thing that struck me was the possibly senile commander stationed there who seemed intent of making sure I was enjoying Colombia. He was very serious about the English speaking cadets who guide you around telling a good story, and on leaving wishes you long life and health to your family and friends in slow but very precise English. The cadets did tell me later they thought he was a bit mad, but it's better than being stationed out on the streets in the slums.
Probably my favourite museum here was the Museo Botero, which houses the art collection and works of Colombia's most famous working artist, Fernando Botero. One of my Spanish teachers in Sydney was a Medellin native who told me to look out for the Botero statues when I got to Medellin, so I thought it worth a look at the museum here in Bogota. It turns out his work consists almost entirely of statues of chubby people and animals. He seems to have a wicked sense of humour, with his fat version of the Mona Lisa a bit of a stand out. You can't help but smirk at some of the paintings and sculptures where you see them, which is the kind of thing that you simply don't do when looking at most serious art. He is also a bit of a collector, and his donated collection includes a whole art history lesson of Impressionist painters and 20th century sculpture.
I took probably the most different bike tour of my life on my first full day here, which takes in all the major sites like cathedrals, churches and government buildings and mixes them together with the seedier parts of town in a totally matter of fact way. I liked the bit where our guide told us where to buy back our camera or mobile phone if they were stolen, and told us about when one of the tour bikes got stolen and the owner managed to get to the second hand bike shop and get it back before it got sold on. You also take in alleys lined with political graffiti you'd never dream of coming to yourself, and the cities' main market where tourists are still rare enough that people openly stare at you. There I tried to introduce my hung over stomach to the local custom of topping their fruit salad with icecream and salty cheese but only managed half of my small salad, which seemed to weigh about half a kilo.
My favourite part of the tour though, was Tejo. Only in Colombia could they make up a gentle pastime involving gunpowder. You take a big wooden box full of clay and stick little paper triangles filled with gunpowder in it. They you take 5kg metal weights and toss them at the box from across the room. If you score a direct hit the gunpowder explodes. Add to this the fact you tend to also buy a 24 crate of beer before you start and much hilarity ensures. The place they hold it is a total man cave, with a bloke cooking big slabs of beef on an open fire in the doorway and tables of blokes sitting around drinking beer and singing karaoke (with no TV to show you the words). Ok, that last bit doesn't make sense, but it's also negated by the TVs showing football at a volume that tends to drown out the sounds of exploding gunpowder.
The thing that will always overshadow my time here is the fact I got here on a weekend and the Colombians like a party. While the Saturday night out in the posh Zona Rosa could have happened anywhere in the world, Friday night was something different. After a minibus ride out from the hostel about an hour north of the city where part of the ticket included all the premixed rum and coke you can drink in a packed minibus on Colombia quality roads (about half ends up on your rather than in you) I ended up at Andres Carne De Res, by some accounts the best club in Colombia. Only it's more of a steak house with a couple of dance floors. It's probably best described as Oktoberfest on mushrooms, with the same kind of big communal tables that have been improved by the addition of things like neon windmills and bright flashing lights. The crowd covers all age groups and we got there when the eating was over and the partying was under way. I didn't know what I expected, but that certainly wasn't it. The Colombians, however are quite forward and friendly and speak a fairly high standard of English so you tend to make new friends pretty quickly. The all you can drink rum I suspect was because the drinks are really expensive by Colombian standards and tend to be sold in bowls and jugs rather than by the cup.
The fact you can get so highly drunk safely is probably on of the bigger testaments to just how much the security situation must have improved in the recent past. You do get your fair share of the you-should-have-been-here-x-years ago crowd, but so far I'm liking Colombia above anywhere else I've been to in South America thus far, and I'm still only in the city everyone told me to skip. So after 4 nights instead of 2 I'm packing my bags for Medellin in the morning, which used to be the most violent city in the world, but is the place they've been warning me I may never leave now.