Further Wanderings

Bogota is Colombia’s largest city, and by some measures one of the largest in the Americas, with over 8 million residents within its boundaries. This makes navigating it using only “collectivos” (shared minibuses with somewhat cryptic route descriptions/destinations lists hung in the window) something of a challenging prospect.

Thankfully we arrived at around 05:00 on our overnight bus from Medellin (which took us down about 1200m to 400m ASL before twisting and turning its way 1600m right back up again.) And our couchsurfing hosts’ home was on a major street not TOO far away from the bus station. All we had to do was divine whether the sign on that collectivo meant that it ran ALONG the length of Calle 26, or simply that it crossed it at some point. Such subtleties are far from easy when you don’t speak a language very well, but thankfully we got it right.

So at around 08:00 we showed up at their gated apartment complex (this by no means marked it as a particularly fancy home… gates and armed guards for middle class houses are very common all over Colombian cities.) This was just early enough for us to see our host Lorey off to work (Lorey was our “official” CS host, though all three of her flatmates, and even casual visitors to the flat made us feel welcome.)

It also gave us time to have a nap before going out for a look around the city in the afternoon.

Pre-Colombian bird head Shaman’s jewelry from the Bogota Gold Museum.

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Medellin. The name conjures up visions of Pablo Escobar, car bombs and gun battles with police in the streets. But that was all a long time ago. As someone or other commented, the foreign view of the city was formed with horror stories from the newspapers fifteen years ago, and since nobody has written newspaper stories about it since, the image has stuck while the city have moved on.

It’s not all sunshine and light. There are many areas of the city where it’s not particularly safe for foreigners (or indeed anyone obviously wealthy) to go out walking at night (or, some would say, during the day even.) Medellin sits in a broad valley at 1600m ASL, with the city centre and wealthier suburbs on the valley floor while the less affluent neighbourhoods climb the slopes up above.

Most of our time in the city was spent in the former. Our hostel was in the posh “Zona Rosada” (pink zone) and our first journey out was into the very centre of the city. We took the metro and got off at the major interchange station and took a walk through the city centre roughly following the metro line. The neighbourhoods we wandered through varied widely in character. At the start was the bustling, seedy feeling central city, where people hawked all manner of things from carts and shoppers shared space with packs of slightly dodgy looking teenagers and large numbers of homeless people. In the middle was a quieter commercial/light industrial area where we popped into a cafe for a delicious blackberry milkshake. At the far end was the tourist hub of the city. There the carts were selling popcorn, hotdogs and toys to the hordes of Colombian families who were enjoying their Sunday afternoon at the botanic gardens, the zoo, the newly refurbished planetarium, or the shiny new polished concrete public square.

Street scene near to the Medellin city centre.

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When the time came for my family to leave Colombia and return to Canada Sarah and I realized that we hadn't really given enough thought to what we were going to do next. So we ended up spending a ... [Continue reading this entry]

As with last time I got way behind in posting, the reason is partly because of slow writing, partly because of irregular internet access. But fear not! As with last time I have a couple entries ready to ... [Continue reading this entry]