We've been in Bogota for four full days and will be leaving for Cartagena tomorrow so I thought I would post a few pictures. For those who'd like to see more, check out my blog at
http://haveyoumetzaider.blogspot.com/
An image from our bike tour on our first full day. Some delicious fruit that I don't remember the name of. Many of the fruits we've tried don't even have english names because they don't grow anywhere where english is spoken.
Bullfighting ring in Bogota. Bullfighting was outlawed just a couple of years ago due to massive protests, but since then, there have been protests and hunger strikes to bring it back.
Bogota has a lot of graffiti in it, much of it is actually commissioned artwork with the consent of the business owner. Our tour guide was also a graffiti artist and showed us a number of his pieces, like this one, depicting the Banana Massacre.
Bogota's Gold Museum is a must-see while you're there. Its incredibly well-done and admission price is like $1.50 CAD. This is a conch shell that was wrapped in Gold and then the shell disintegrated over time, leaving just the gold.
Another image from the gold museum
We visited an old salt mine that contained a cathedral in the small town of Zipaquira. This is a salt waterfall that is 180m underground. For scale, those are people at the bottom.
Some of the rock carving in the cathedral was pretty impressive.
Today, we climbed Monserrate, which is a mountain to the east of the city. This is a panorama from the top. Bogota is at ~2600m above sea level and the climb took us up another 500m in only 3km to get to 3150m above sea level. I have definitely found the thinner air to be challenging and we haven't even made it to Peru or the salt flats of Argentina (both will have elevations close to 4000m above sea level).
Some of the many stairs on the climb up to the top. There are over 1500 stairs! You can also take the cable car or funicular to get to the top, but we thought we'd opt for the adventure. One of the guys staying in the hostel with us was robbed at knife-point on the pathway up yesterday. Lost everything but his passport because he'd chosen to go too late, when the police had left.
Anyway, those are just some of the pictures that we've taken over the past few days. I'll try to share some more every once in a while, but my blog will definitely be updated more often.
