Day 2: Bogotá

First things first:  Isn't my wife the cutest?

On to the day's sights...

On our way to Monteserrate, we saw this guy doing soccer tricks for money during a red light in the middle of a busy intersection.  Sure beats the cardboard signs the homeless people in San Francisco use.

Bogotá geography:  The Andes run the length of South America up the western side, and split into 3 mountain ranges at the southern tip of Colombia.  Bogotá sits in a plateau 8,600 feet up on the easternmost of these ranges.  It's surrounded by even higher peaks, including "El Cerro de Monserrate" (Monserrate Peak) which is pretty prominent and rises dramatically right behind Bogotá's downtown.  There's a good picture here.  At the top of the peak there is a church built in the 17th century.  Popular destination for pilgrims and tourists alike. 


8,600 feet is plenty high, but surprisingly none of us had felt any physical effects of the altitude.  Then we took the gondola (or, as Joaquin called it, the "gongola") up almost another 2000 feet to Monserrate.  Oofah.  Surprisingly, priests in the 1600's hadn't anticipated tourists pushing 3-year-olds in small-wheeled strollers and paved the little village surrounding the church with uneven stones and stairs.   I felt like I was an out-of-shape sherpa scaling Everest without oxygen as I carried around the 40 pound load.  Picture here from Betsy's blog.


Anyway, as you might imagine, there were some incredible views.  This is what a city of 9 million people looks like:

Here's the family out and about at Monserrate

Overall take on Bogotá:  I loved it.  Incredible city.  Cool urban feel, very clean and functional for a huge city, surrounded by lush green hills and countryside, great food, friendly people...it really exceeded my expectations.  We had a great time.  My family is from Medellín (where we're headed tomorrow), which is the second largest city of Colombia, and is an incredible place, but has a little bit of a second-city inferiority complex to Bogotá.  People from Medellín are very similar in civic pride and temperament to Texans -- the first thing out of their mouth when you meet them is that they're from Medellín, and the second is something about how much they don't like Bogotá.   Too cold, the people are snobs, etc.  Not true.  I love Medellín and its gritty vibrancy, and can't wait to get there.  But it will definitely feel like the wild west after the cool sophistication of Bogotá.

Lots more pictures of the village and Bogotá on the trip photo album.  See you in Medellín.

Day 1: Bogota

First, let me get a shout out to my blogging wife Betsy.  She has taken some great pictures with her iPhone 4 and is blogging at Betsy's Colombia Trip Blog

Great day 1.  Catedral de Sal and Museo de Oro accomplished.  Details here:  Betsy's Blog, Day 1


Here’s our hotel.

Like most modern buildings in Bogota & Medellin, it’s made of brick.  It works for me, I think it looks great.  Here's the building across the street.  Pretty typical of the nice residential neighborhood.

and a shot of Joaquin, just because he's so cute.

On to Zipaquira / Catedral de Sal.  Nothing makes you feel safer than heavily-armed military police just hanging out at the entrance to the park.

mmmm...arepas.  Arepas are the Colombian version of tortillas, but imagine if they stopped pounding them flat at 1/4 of an inch.  And instead of bland flour or white corn, use very sweet yellow corn.  Grill quickly, so they're crispy on the outside but still gooey on the inside.  Now slather in butter and cover with cheese.  Yes, yummy.   That’s why I was so excited to see a sign for a food stand called “Arepa’s World” (don’t sweat the apostrophe.  We’ll see much worse misuse of English throughout our journey).

What good is an amazing cathedral carved into the hollows of an old salt mine without a huge rock-climbing structure outside?  Adrian rocked it.

Inside the salt cathedral.  Walking down the mine shaft tunnel to the cathedral, there is salt lining the walls.  Even though you know that thousands of visitors before you have done the exact same thing, you can’t help yourself - you lick your finger, touch the wall, and lick your finger again to prove to yourself that yes, this is salt.  I propped the kids up on my shoulders to allow them to lick-dab-lick the ceiling of the tunnel, where hopefully fewer people had done so before.

Lots more pictures on the trip photo album here.

Arrival in Bogota

After a long (7 hrs) and thankfully uneventful flight from LAX, we arrived at Bogota airport.  As we later learned from our shuttle driver, 8 flights had all arrived within 10 minutes of each other, so the line to get through immigration was obscenely long.  However, never being above exploiting our children, I pointed at Joaquin (3) in the stroller and asked the nice lady in the security uniform if they had a special line for people with kids, to which she replied "Como no, señor", and we were on our way to the front of the line.  Without exaggeration, that move probably saved us 2 hours...

We zipped through immigration and security, and our hotel shuttle driver was waiting for us.

We checked into the hotel at 11:00.  This place is awesome, with 2 rooms plus a pull out sofa in the living room.  Will post pictures tomorrow.  We watched a little Top Chef Masters (in English with Spanish subtitles), then some Saturday Night Live (ditto).  Tomorrow we're hoping to see the Catedral de Sal and the Museo de Oro.  It's an ambitious agenda to try to squeeze both in in one day, but they're closed on Monday and we leave on Tuesday, so a jet-lagged-first-day-in-new-city-tourist-hot-spots blitz is our only option.

Oh yeah - we ordered burgers for dinner (room service).  Burgers were great, fries were great.  But Betsy and I ordered cheeseburgers, and our cheese looked a little lumpy, like something was tucked between the cheese and the patty.  I figured mushrooms, maybe a pickle, but no -- sliced and grilled hot dog slices.  Good ones, too!  We gave them to Joaquin, he loved them.  We'll see what surprises breakfast brings...

Jaime's Farm

My cousin Jaime, mentioned in last post, is an incredibly colorful character, as well as a very warm and friendly person.  He is the oldes of a family of 6 siblings, and inherited and has significantly enhanced his family farm.  Speaking of "enhanced", one of the tools of his trade is his jeep, shown above.  Custom transmission, who knows how many horsepower, 200watt speakers, fire engine siren - it's a sight to behold and the ride of a lifetime.

Jaime took us on a tour of his farm, which has 8000 plaintain trees and 180,000 coffee plants.  It was an amazing experience.

Complete album here:  http://picasaweb.google.com/oscardario/JaimesFarm

Bolivar

Bolivar is a beautiful old town in a coffee farming region of Colombia. My mom and dad were raised there, before getting married and moving to Medellin. My gradmother's house was a beautiful classic colonial home in the center of town, across the street from the church and the plaza.

It's an incredibly verdant landscape, with every shade of green imaginable on the hillsides, including the dark rich green of coffee plants.

Most of our family and friends that still live there are involved in the coffee industry in one way or another, including my cousin Jaime who owns a huge coffee farm (next post).

It used to be the case that the only place to get good coffee in Colombia was to go to the airport and buy the "export quality" stuff that they generally sold to the United States, but I noticed that the quality of the coffee in general had improved quite a bit. Here are the boys drinking basically frapuccinos at a little coffee shop (much more charming than a starbucks) in Bolivar.

As in many farming areas, in Bolivar you have the extremes of wealth and poverty, so you see both beautiful colonial architecture and third-world shantys. The boys didn't seem fazed by any of it, but it was definitely a good experience to expose them to it all.

You can view the complete photo album here: http://picasaweb.google.com/oscardario/Bolivar

Bolivar

Bolivar is a beautiful old town in a coffee farming region of Colombia.  My mom and dad were raised there, before getting married and moving to Medellin.  My gradmother's house was a beautiful classic colonial home in the center of town, across the street from the church and the plaza.

It's an incredibly verdant landscape, with every shade of green imaginable on the hillsides, including the dark rich green of coffee plants.

Most of our family and friends that still live there are involved in the coffee industry in one way or another, including my cousin Jaime who owns a huge coffee farm (next post).

It used to be the case that the only place to get good coffee in Colombia was to go to the airport and buy the "export quality" stuff that they generally sold to the United States, but I noticed that the quality of the coffee in general had improved quite a bit.  Here are the boys drinking basically frapuccinos at a little coffee shop (much more charming than a starbucks) in Bolivar.

As in many farming areas, in Bolivar you have the extremes of wealth and poverty, so you see both beautiful colonial architecture and third-world shantys.  The boys didn't seem fazed by any of it, but it was definitely a good experience to expose them to it all.

You can view the complete photo album here:

http://picasaweb.google.com/oscardario/Bolivar

Jaime's Farm

My cousin Jaime, mentioned in last post, is an incredibly colorful character, as well as a very warm and friendly person.  He is the oldest of a family of 6 siblings, and inherited and has significantly expanded and enhanced his family farm.  Speaking of "enhanced", one of the tools of his trade is his jeep, shown below.  Nimble as a mountain goat, but with 200 watt speakers and a fire engine siren, this thing can climb out of anything.

Jaime took us on a tour of his farm, which has 8000 plantain trees and 180,000 coffee plants.  It was an amazing experience.

more pictures at http://picasaweb.google.com/oscardario/JaimesFarm