Bogota – Colombia's Mega City Capital

When I decided to continue on to Colombia from Panama on this trip, I had to decide how much of the country to try to see . Colombia is a big place with a lot to see that takes a while to get around. At first I thought I would just take in the Caribbean Coast, a part of the country where weather at that time of year was good and is isolated by a significant distance from the Andean Highlands. Then I discovered it would be much cheaper to fly home from Bogota or Medellin than to book a flight directly from Santa Marta, so I decided to add them to my itinerary.

Late March and early April still good time of year for northern Colombia. The dry and rainy seasons in the north correspond with those in most of the Caribbean and Central America with rains mostly May to November. In the rest of Colombia, though, rainiest times are similar to those in other places close to the Equator generally correspond with or follow the two equinoxes and dry periods around and following the solstices. Wikipedia’s climate average stats for Bogota are for very little sunshine and lots of rain in April. True to normal weather patterns despite being an "El Nino" year, it was overcast for almost entire four days in Bogota and rained for much of it, hard at times . Fortunately, there are many things to do indoors in the city including numerous good museums, but the weather kept my movements fairly central.

Bogota is located on a relatively flat high plateau called the Sabana de Bogota at around 8,500 feet altitude, making it South America’s third highest capital city after La Paz and Quito. You don’t get much of a sense that you’re so high in the eastern cordillera of the Andes until you start walking around, though. After a lot of time in the lowlands since Guatemala I could definitely feel the elevation.

If the weather had been better I would likely have ventured farther in Bogota and walked a long distance through the swanker northern parts of the city to get more of a sense of the place even if there’s not much in the way of sights there. It’s always interesting to see more of a big city to understand how people there live (and how you might live yourself if a work project ever took you there) . I only saw the north side of Bogota, though, from a taxi on the way to and from the salt cathedral at Zipaquira north of the city. My driver did point out the posh high rise building where he said Colombian pop singer Shakira lives. ”That’s nice! So how long until the traffic will end?”

My two day trips out took me through vastly different sides of Bogota. To the north are the upper and middle class neighborhoods that look like the affluent parts of cities in America and other wealthy countries. To the south is the massive sprawl of industrial areas and informal neighborhoods, the homes of peasants who flocked to city from around the country during twentieth century and built their houses themselves with inexpensive materials. Similar neighborhoods surround all Latin American cities and probably house the majority of the population. I am not sure if it’s accurate to call them slums, since most are functioning neighborhoods of struggling lower income people and are full of small businesses.

Bogota is built at the edge of a mountain ridge immediately to its east. There are several hilltop religious sanctuaries on the peaks two thousand feet above the city including Monserrate on the mountain beside the central part of the city. When the weather briefly cleared on Sunday morning I decided it would be a good time to go up even if it was likely to be one of the busiest times of the week when everyone was off from work and school and a mass was taking place . Unfortunately, the weather was still very hazy and visibility of the city below quite poor. Unlike Medellin where cable cars are part of the urban mass transit system, the cable car and funicular to Monserrat are used entirely by visitors to the shrine and mountain park. Prices are accordingly high for Colombia.

Overall I found Bogota to be somewhat overwhelming, a huge city with supposedly around nine million inhabitants. With no underground metro system it’s often choked in traffic that barely moves, something only partially alleviated by the Transmilenio, a system of dedicated bus lanes which enables busses on some routes to move rapidly through the massive parking lot that it Bogota streets. I was warned to give myself hours to get to the airport because it sometimes takes that long, but at 4:30 A.M. for my early morning flight that wasn’t an issue for me. Bogota also has a reputation as a dangerous place with a very high crime rate. I think that’s improved significantly in recent years as security throughout the country has gotten better. Although I didn’t have problems or feel unsafe, there were several times when I was told by locals to keep my camera hidden, something I usually don’t worry too much about during daylight hours in busy places.