Advertisement
Published: December 7th 2008
Edit Blog Post
Mask
Gold Museum The Medellin-Bogota road links the two most important cities in Colombia, a route popular for both freight and passenger traffic, yet it is one lane in each direction and winds all over the place. Thus, in a bus, you will spend much of your travel time sitting behind lorries waiting for overtaking opportunities. I'd been quoted 8-9 hours for the journey, which turned out to be 11 and felt like 20 as the aircon didn't work and even the locals were complaining about the sweltering conditions.
I'd read that Bogota wasn't a particularly pleasant city, and certainly the area that my hostel was in - La Candelaria - looked extremely sketchy at night. Fortunately by day it was much more pleasant and, as Bogota's historic colonial centre, was peppered with churches and interesting architecture in a way I recognised from numerous towns and cities I've seen this year.
Colombia is famous for coffee, a product I rarely drink, but I was moved to visit a Juan Valdez, part of a Starbucks-like chain common in Colombia and about to make a major promotional push overseas. I can't really comment on the coffee as I drink so little of the stuff
as to have no idea what's good or bad, but they certainly served a luscious slab of chocolate cake.
The highlight of my short stay in Bogota was the several hours I spent in the Gold Museum. I'd come to South America with thoughts of Inca gold and El Dorado, and had been rather disappointed by a lack of the yellow stuff, especially in Cusco (I can only assume the vast majority of the Inca gold was melted down and shipped to Spain), however the Gold Museum gave me an overdose. It was also excellently presented and had information in both Spanish and English. After seeing a myriad masks, figures, and necklaces, the exhibition finished on a high with some of the best pieces in one room, and then finally the darkened Salon Dorado, in which you were temporarily sealed while a light show shone on an enormous collection of gold ornaments, sometimes front-lit sometimes in silhouette, all to the strains of some Deep Forest-style music. The main downer was the museum shop, which hadn't taken full advantage of its source material and I was pushed to even rustle up some acceptable postcards.
Bogota had been refreshingly crisp
Detail
Gold Museum after Medellin, but there was still the occasional downpour during which it became apparent that everyone in the city owns a golfing umbrella, and it's your responsibility rather than theirs to avoid getting your eye poked out. Though driving was as apparently lawless as everywhere else in South America, it's been interesting to note throughout the country that motorcyclists all wear helmets and reflective vests bearing the registration number of their machine.
I only gave myself three days in Bogota and I regretted not having a couple more to fully explore it. In particular, the salt cathedral at Zipaquira had to go down the pan due to lack of time.
One major downside to not having completed my intended full circuit of the continent was that I was going to have to return to Buenos Aires at something faster than a leisurely pace in order to catch my flight out. And there are no cheap and quick options for getting from Bogota to Buenos Aires, with a one-way flight costing as much as a London<->New York return, and the bus taking at least a week and costing more than half the price of the plane anyway. So plane
Detail
Iglesia del Carmen it was, and for my money I got a flight that had neither head-rests nor entertainment, though we did stop in Lima for 45 minutes.
Eight months after first arriving there, I was back in Buenos Aires.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.441s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 42; qc: 163; dbt: 0.31s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.5mb