Hills, Chills & Headaches

Oops, missed out a major city in all the excitement.

After Leticia and before the Lost City we were in Bogota...

Cool, gray, a little rainy. Perfect.

At altitude, we both got mild headaches for the two days we were there, but it was nice to breathe properly, put on a coat and shoes and also to take our first hot shower in weeks.

We stayed at the Bakano hostel in the La Candelaria district, yet another so-called dangerous place, which we found to be a colourful, fun, studenty area, again slightly reggaefied, with lots of graffitied bars and restaurants.

Towards the city centre was the amazing Gold Museum, showing thousands of examples of incredibly detailed tribal masks, ritualistic ephemera, jewellery, bangles and baubles from the era before the Spanish arrived to screw things up.

It´s that Jan again.

Then the Botero Museum, which housed an excellent Modernist collection, with examples from Corot to the present, paralleled in separate galleries with a chronology of modern Colombian art, which drew heavily from the Europeans.

The museum highlight was the work of top Colombian artist Fernando Botero (see naked lady and big oranges, above).

We paid a funicular pilgrimage to the convent atop the Cerro Monserrate and saw some great views of the city below, then down again by cable car.

We enjoyed Bogota very much, noting as we took a taxi to the bus station that we had clearly only scratched the surface of this sprawling city.

More Bogota pictures here...

On now to Santa Marta and the Caribbean coast...