After our Newark through Atlanta flights, we landed at the airport in Bogota late in the night on 1/10/08. Getting off the plane brought that same sense of openness/uncertainty that I have felt at the airports in Lima and Tel Aviv and Warsaw. Everything seems both excitingly new and also really confusing – and I felt myself torn between my curiosity, which wanted to stare and take everything in, and my sensibilities, which wanted to appear as little like a tourist as possible. Of course, its pretty tough to avoid looking like a tourist with a giant blue REI backpack on – not to mention the pasty white skin, the American clothes, and the probable look of befuddlement in my eyes. We found the area in the airport designated for having taxi fares issued: you tell the clerk where you are going, they write down a rate, and you hand that to the taxi driver. Eliminates the traditional initial international taxi ride rip-off as you struggle to figure out what a reasonable fee is. Our driver had a little trouble finding the Hotel Aragon – and almost backed over three bar-goers in the process of his search – but he eventually got us there.
Despite our best effort to make reservations from the US, they had no record of us. “No problemo.” There were plenty of vacancies. The rooms looked relatively clean, with wood floors and a lot of very beat up furniture. A bathroom down the hall. All this for 35,000 pesos per night, or roughly $18. Of course we were not informed that there is a bar down the street from the hotel that would be blasting bad Latin American dance music mixed in with old Guns n Roses tunes into the wee hours – but it was all somehow pretty tolerable.
I awoke early on Sunday and I was anxious to get a call into New York just to tell mom and dad we'd arrived. Only I'd forgotten that almost nothing would be open on a Sunday! Well, except for a Dunkin Donuts, of course! Yup – buried among the brightly colored classically South American buildings of La Candalaria District in Bogota, Colmbia, all with doors padlocked shut, was a fairly modern looking Dunkin Donuts. Remembering the advice of one of the guide books about accepting countries for what they are now – even when that means clear signs of Westernization – we decided to take advantage of the situation. We broke out the Spanish-English dictionary and figured out how to ask for a phone card, only to find out there would be no possibility of getting any until Tuesday since most stores are closed both Sunday and Monday! That meant no internet cafes either for dropping an email. So I found a public pay phone and wrestled with the Spanish recorded messages for a while until I made my way to an operator who was able to get a collect call into Staten Island. My Dad sounded right next door as we caught one another up a bit before the call was cut off.
After a quick stop back to the room and a few sips of super nasty coffee the hotel offered, we made our way down to a “bazaar” which was more like a giant garage sale with people creating stalls in the Las Aguas Plaza with blankets and laying out odd arrays of anything they had and wanted to sell – from Barbie dolls, to magazines, to wrist watches, to cell phones, to computer keyboards, to... you get the picture. We settled for a couple of cups of jugo de naranjo (orange juice) for which we think we were probably charged double – like 50 cents a cup when it probably should have been a quarter. Live and learn.
From there, we decided to join “the pilgrims”climbing Cerro (mountain) Monserrate to a church at the top. Several people I'd spoken to about Bogota, including those Colombian sisters who came to our garage sale, had insisted that a trip to Bogota is not complete without taking the cable car to the top of Cerro Monserrate to take in the view of the city. Our guidebook said that the only day tourists can walk to the top of the mountain safe from thieves is on Sunday when the many pilgrims also make the climb. The term “pilgrims” did not prepare us for the hundreds upon hundreds of people making the climb to the church. People of all ages and shapes, some dressed in nicer Sunday-wear, but most dressed (as is everyone in this city, it seems) in the most stylish Western-looking clothing possible. Families, single people, and many hand-holding couples. The stone-staired path that climbs the mountain was lined with shops selling food and drinks – everything from bags of Stella Doro-looking cookies, to meat-on- a-stick, to fried cheese pasteries, to taffy – much of it being made there fresh. There was plenty to drink on the way, too – juices, sodas, energy drinks, and lots of beer. There were street mimes and loud music lining the way, too. In short, this pilgrimage was much more of a steet fair than anything else! It was a perfect way to begin to get to know the feel of this city.
The climb to the top was challenging, especially with limited acclimatizing to the 8000 foot altitide of Bogota, but we made it. We milled about outside the church among people picnicking at the top – many sipping on more beer or some on Bailey's. We walked over to the church cafe, to the church souvenir stand, and to the large stalled marketplace, all teeming with people like a department store on Black Friday. We also attended mass for a little while. The service seemed catered to the masses, with prayers sung with pop music accompanyment and lots of flashing lights in the church. Still, it was wonderfully lively and the people seemed thrilled to be in attendance. As I explored, I thought about how I'll probably be seeing similar paradoxical scenes with Buddhist pilgrims when we get to Asia. The mix of true adherents and those who are attracted through cultural tradition seems a universal truth across religions.
We climbed down the hill and were pretty beat. After a quick visit to the internet cafe to find out that the Eagles had ousted the Giants and were on their way to the NFC Championshp (Yes!!) and a light dinner of papaya (Miral) and little coconut-flavored rolls (me) we called our first day in Bogota a success.
We decided to start Day 2 with a walking tour of the city. Clear to us that we needed better coffee than the hotel provided, we began with a stop into Juan Valdez Cafe – a local chain that has clearly embraced the Starbucks business plan. The coffee was great, but what struck us most was that the “grande” at Juan Valdez was smaller than the “tall,” the smallest size at Starbucks. A reminder that even countries embracing our corporate America ways have not yet become as gluttonous as us. Give them time, I fear. From there our wanderings included a main square that was done up in Christmas lights less than impressive in the daytime, but likely spectacular at night; a visit to a musem featuring a local Colombian artist who likes to paint people in a cartoonishly obese way (or, as Miral put it, as if they all had gotten puffy from allergic reactions); found an all-vegetarian restaurant for a delicious lunch of tamales that included mock chicken meat!; watched the street phenomenon of Guinea Pig betting (i.e., put your money down on one of about 30 plastic igloos, let the Ginea Pig run, and the igloo he runs into is the winner); strolled through another garage sale area, and called it a day.
The walk through the city made clear that Bogota is a pretty modern city – plenty of western style fast food places and western style clothing stores; people looking very Euro-urban; and although everyone is really friendly, the masses generally seem to be in as much of a rush to get somewhere as any US city. I guess this makes Bogota a pretty good segue city for us. We are definitely in a foreign country – any attempt to communicate with locals drives that fact home! And there are tons of cultural differences, from the tiny taxi cabs to the bread that comes in non-resealable, hard plastic bags, to also remind you. But, still, the general philosophy of life (what we can make of it mainly from observation) seems pretty American-like. As the acknowledgement of this sets in, I found myself beginning to crave moving on from the city into some of the smaller towns of Colombia.
On day 3 in Bogota, we decided to see if we could journey a few hours north of the city to an attraction (and I only call it that because signs all around it describe it as the main attraction of all of Colombia!) called the Catedral del Sal (Church of Salt). We took Bogota's fairly new Transmilineo (a massive modern busline with it's own roads so that it operates more like a train line) to the Portal del Norte and from there hopped a collectivo to Zipaquira, the town where the church is located. We grabbed a block of cheese, a package of saltines, and a loaf of wonderbread, found the town's plaza, and had our first Colombian picnic. We then made the fifteen minute walk through the town and out to the cathedral.
Despite the amusment park atmosphere, the cathedral was truly a wonder – and the English speaking tour guide helped us get so much more out of it. Built into a mountain of salt that is still being excavated (or exploited, as our tour guide put it), the cathedral is a set of winding, massive caverns hollowed out to form the cathedral – nearly the entirety of the place carved from the salt rock. The walk to the cathedral is lined by representations of the stations of the cross. I'd learned about the stations – which together tell the story of the crucifixion of Jesus – from Miral over the last few years. Unlike most, these depictions were symbolic. For example, one station marking Jesus embracing his mother Mary has a cross (carved in salt rock, of course) with another beautifully carved rock touching the top of the cross. Each station was unique and exquisite. The cathedral itself, with a huge center altar space and two knaves (one representing life and one death) was breathtaking. In the altar space, a huge cross was hollowed out of the salt rock and backlit so that it created the illuson of a floating glowing rock cross. It was mindstopping. It was hard to believe that the whole cathedral was created in four years in the 1990s after the original Catedral del Sal was ruined by water dissolving it. After the tour (and a few minutes of a really lame 3-D movie) we returned to the main cathedral and meditated for a while before making our way out. A few minutes in a lame salt minimg museum, one Colectivo ride, and one Transmileneo ride later, we were back in Bogota. We had our first sit down dinner – a nice meal of fruit salad, fried yucca, french fries, rice, and fried trout (yes, trout -- I have quickly accepted that seafood will be necessary here if I am to have any source of protein other than cheese). Our last day in Bogota was behind us, as we planned to depart the city in the morning, destination Salerno...
