My Colombian adventure begins with a crude 3AM wake-up call in my parents' basement, followed by a 2.5 hour airport shuttle to Detroit, a 2 hour wait, a 2 hour plane ride, another five hour wait, then a six hour plane ride. How happy I was to see the smiling faces of my friend Paola and her cousin Iván waiting for me when I landed in Bogotá at 10PM the following evening.
By taxi we travelled to Paola's aunt's place, a modest apartment with beautiful antique furnature tucked away in this sprawling mountain metropolis of 8 million. After a greasy snack of sausage and arepas from a local fast-food joint, I slept like a baby.
The next day Paola and Diego—another friend from my high-school days in Londombia—took me on a tour of the northern part of the city. This classy end of town is equipped with luxury apartments on a backdrop of lucious green mountains, and shopping malls that put most Canadian cities to shame. The brief sojurn into the daily haunts of Bogotá's upper middle class provided decent training for the evening: a birthday party at a dance club in La Zona Rosa.
Zona Rosa provides the visitor with the same awesome feeling that you get on Richmond Row in London or in Byward Market in Ottawa: damn, being young kicks ass. Now multiply that times a thousand, because this place is HUGE! You all know that I'm not a fan of dance clubs, but when in Rome... The two-room bar had one DJ spinning a mix of reggaeton and Latin pop music, while the other was pure House. American rap videos played on the big screen in the first room, while shots from Tiësto and Deadmau5 concerts—intersperced with some very strange porn—filled the second. Colombians are expert dancers when it comes to Latin music, but if you play Hip Hop or House they are as clueless as the rest of us. Grinding is taboo here, but for some reason dry-humping each other face-to-face is not. All in all, North Bogotá is a WORLD-CLASS party scene if you don't mind paying $5 for a beer or $300 for a bottle of tequila—they don't sell shots individually. For hippies like me, it's a pretentious place that makes Up on Carling feel like the the Poacher's Arms. The booze-fuelled night put me $50 in the hole, and left me rather apprehensive about hiking around a sacred lake at high altitudes with Paola's extended family the following day.
Underlying the prosperity and optimism apparent in the wealthy north, there is a country with deep social divisions and grinding inequality. This was apparent even before I left Canada, not for Colombia's well-hidden poverty but for its extravagant displays of wealth and privilige. My neighbour on the airport shuttle to Detroit—a young golfer heading to Indianapolis—told me that he travels to Bogotá every year to visit a rich guy who is friends with Donald Trump. They get an armed escort to pick them up at the airport, which travels in a police-authorised convoy to luxury ranch just outside the city. I would have dismissed these tales as the product of exaggeration had I not met a rich kid from Florida on second leg of my flight who was heading down to visit his girlfriend. He was unable to give me any advice on taxis because she has a driver to take them around the city. Upon our arrival, the kid was escorted away by two men in tuxedos while the other 227 passengers walked down a long hallway to the even longer lineup at Customs. Coming from a country where millionaires and homeless people wait for service in the same emergency room, this all seemed very strange.
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Okay, forget about family day at the lake. On Sunday morning I snuck out of Paola's aunt's house exhausted and hungover after a long night of drunk dancing in La Zona Rosa. The plan was for the taxi to take me to a hostel in the historic Candelaría district, but most of the streets were closed for a marathon, meaning I had to walk. The marathon was a bit disorganized: people seemed to be running around in all directions, stopping and starting again at random intervals. It is also the only time you will see a non-tourist wearing shorts in Bogotá. Arriving at my hostel, I paid COP20.000 a night (about $11) for a bed in an 8-person dorm in a cool neighbourhood that gets seedy at night. Unlimited coffee, tea, a maté de yerba is also included. No more partying with the Estrato Seis; it's museum time in gringoland.
Yesterday I took a quick walk through the Military Museum. Not much to see besides old guns and cardboard models Apache helos, but the uniformed soldiers headbanging to Sean Paul at the front desk were funny enough to make the visit worthwhile. Next is the Museo Botero, an art gallery dedicated to its epynonymous Colombian artist who specializes in round and fat things: pears, watermelon, fat people, and fat animals. The highlight was a magnificient sculpture of a fat woman having sex with a swan, as well as some of the lesser known works of Dali, Monet, Picasso, and others.
I am currently writing from an Internet café in the eastern part of the downtown core. The somewhat downtrodden area is filled with shops selling just about everything, and my roast chicken lunch cost COP4.200—about $2.50. For some reason Colombians don't eat vegetables, though the fresh juice and ice cream of exotic fruits—maracuya, feijoa, guanabana, curuba—more than make up for it. I'm now off to find a place to buy and send postcards, which is a difficult task in a country with no national postal service. I'll hopefully post the first round of pictures this evening. Tomorrow its off to Ibagué, then Armenia in the coffee-growing district by Friday.
