Bogota

Overall, this was a huge city (8 million population) with a grey, rainy climate and temps in the 60’s. I knew this from my research, but it still wasn’t very appealing in person.

Also, we ended up being very disappointed when we had planned to hike up Monserrate, the 10,000+ ft mountain behind the city, on Saturday morning. We headed out early to beat the crowds, but when the taxi dropped us off at the trailhead, we found it closed for the day due to a Red Bull sponsored downhill bike race. We later found out from others, that Saturdays are frequently the day when events are held there, thus closing it to hikers.

So we made the best of it, and wandered through the “Old Town”, La Candelaria.

We were surprised to find it nearly deserted, but there was some colorful street art we took in -

Besides climbing Monserrate, we had two other activities to do in the city, and we thoroughly enjoyed them.

The first was joining a fruit tasting tour in an enormous fruit market…

Mangosteen (tasted like a mix of lychee, strawberry and pineapple)

… where we tasted 25 different tropical fruits and juices.

Two notes here - that fruit above is Soursop, which is a neat mixture of sweet and sour. Also, every stand had their produce arranged in visually appealing displays. My favorite:

This was one of my favorite tasting fruits, Dragonfruit -

it tasted like a very sweet pear/kiwi mix

This cracked me up -

apples from Washington?? when they have all these wonderful local fruits?

There was also a flower market out in the parking lot of this building, and they start selling the flowers at 0400. Roses are almost literally a dime a dozen…

… as are orchids -

The next day, we went to the Gold Museum. As we headed to the ticket window, we asked for 2 tickets, and after a minute or so, the man asked to see our passports. We had just shown them at the front door (along with our COVID vaccine cards) to be able to enter, but we shrugged, and gave them to him. He handed them back and said, “no charge”. When we were given our tickets, they were labelled “Senior $0”. Nice surprise! :) We then went to the counter to sign up for an English speaking guide (it had been highly recommended in my research), and again were very pleasantly surprised that this was included in our entrance fee. (without the Senior discount, a ticket cost $2 USD) There were some gorgeously cool pieces…

… and the piece de resistance, which is slightly larger than Steve’s hand and depicts a pre-colonization legend that a chief loaded a raft up with gold to deposit in a lake as an offering to the gods:

This was made in the “lost wax” method, where a model is made in wax first, then surrounded by clay. The wax inside is melted and allowed to run out, and then the molten metal is poured in. After it cools, the clay mold is broken, thus making these objects one of a kind. They can be very intricate and detailed, as you can see above.

This museum also had a stone statue from the San Augustin region in southwest Colombia (an area that we decided not to visit on this trip). This was how Steve and I felt after spending 2 1/2 hours in a fascinating museum for free: