We landed in Bogota with a couple of days to explore the city before meeting our small tour group.
We were pleasantly surprised by Bogota. The guides we read hadn’t really rated it, and we were expecting just a big, dirty city. Instead we found an interesting city, with most of the old colonial part in the “La Candelaria” central area. Maybe the guide books are just rating Bogota relative to some of the other better preserved colonial cities that we were still to visit.
Unusually for a capital city, Bogota is not located on the coast or on a major river. It’s located in an ancient dried-up lake bed surrounded by mountains. That also made it quite inaccessible. The main reason for its location was the fresh water sources from the mountains.
As we were flying on Michelle’s birthday, we went to a steak restaurant for her belated birthday meal. It was quite an improvement on the Iberia plane (plain?) food.
We took the customary “free” walking tour, and the following day we visited some of the sights that were highlighted in the walking tour. One of the top sights is the Gold Museum “Museo del Oro”. We also visited the Money Museum (“Museo Casa de la Moneda”) which was very interesting.
Bogota public transport has priority over cars in the city. Many roads are exclusively for buses. There are platforms like stations for boarding. This allows for huge long bendy buses.
Bogota is a very artistic place. The reference point is the Botero Art Museum (“Museo Botero”). Botero specialised in painting people and animals which were designed to be fat. We really didn’t appreciate the art there, but the street art is excellent. Apparently the street art was kicked-off when Justin Bieber played a concert in Bogota and it the rules for street art vs. graffiti have been formalised by the city council, from where you need to get permission.
