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Bogota
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For the last 3 days I´ve been in Bogota, Columbia enjoying the cool weather and clean, high-altitude air (it´s at 2600m).
Wednesday was exhausting since I stayed up all the night before in Minneapolis preparing, and then got to sit at the Miami airport for most of the day. Caught a taxi to my hostel in Bogota and got in a little before midnight.
My hostel is in an area of central Bogota called La Candelaria, which is an old neighborhood sitting on the lower slopes of the mountains that rise to the east of the city. It´s full of colorful old buildings, great restaurants, museums, and steeply angled streets. Speaking of streets, the city is very well planned, with all the east-west streets called calles and the north-south ones called carreras. They´re all sequentially numbered so by looking at just about any building´s address you can tell exactly where you are.
On Thursday I went down to the Plaza de Bolivar, a massive square faced by the national capital building, city hall, the supreme court, and a grand cathedral. I took a look at the high-tech Arango library, one of the best on the continent, and the Casa de la Moneda museum, where I sheltered during the only rain I saw in Bogota (a one-hour downpour). While looking around for a restaurant with some vegetarian fare using my non-existant Spanish skills, I had great luck and happened to wander into a delicious all-vegetarian place. To drink I had this nice lemonade that was a lot less sweet and more sour than what we usually have in the U.S. Then for dinner, I ate at a dimly-lit, fantasy-themed mushroom restaurant called Merlin.
Friday I spent with some Americans I met. We visited the Gold Museum, containing 35,000 items of gold work, many of them spectacular. I wandered around La Candelaria some more and had falafel for dinner at a Jewish restaurant.
Early this evening I´ll be flying on to Lima, Peru, via Quito, Ecuador. Bogota is a good mid-altitude place to get partially acclimatized for the soaring heights of eastern Peru and Bolivia, so I´m hoping that my short time in Lima (which lies in a desert at sea-level) won´t take away that benefit. My hostel in Lima is picking me up from the airport, and then the tomorrow afternoon I´m hopping on a 20-hour bus to Cuzco. It´s the old Inca capital and is connected by rail to both Macchu Picchu and Lake Titicaca.
Latest Comments (1)
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Enjoying reading your journal! (reply)
Aug 27, 2006 17:59 EST by luvs2travel
Great job on this journal, Joe!
Looking forward to hearing about your travels in Peru. We're going there for a week in October. We are a bit concerned about altitude sickness since we'll be flying from Lima to Cuzco on our second day, and allowing a day or two to adjust. Did it bother you at all? Did you try the coca leaves, or did you bring an over-the-counter remedy from home? Si... show all
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