4) It is not hot! Don't think that because it is in the "tropics" it will be warm. Bogota is the 3rd highest modern city in the Americas (after La Paz and Lima), and because it is in the Andes, it will be cold;  think…Read More

4) It is not hot! Don't think that because it is in the "tropics" it will be warm. Bogota is the 3rd highest modern city in the Americas (after La Paz and Lima), and because it is in the Andes, it will be cold;  think of it as an eternal spring/autumn. Annual average temperature during the daytime ranges from 58º to 68º F, but at night it can drop as low as in the low 30's. Bring yourself a nice leather jacket or a thick coat; people also use scarves and even gloves from time to time (usually late at night). On freaky days we do get up in the low 70's all thanks to global warming (thank you humankind!).

It rains a lot! Bring an umbrella. We also have a windy season and if I recall well, it's usually in August and you will see a lot of kytes up in the air (competitions and festivals to celebrate the windy season also occur around this time).

5) December: I think it's the best month to visit because you see true Colombian traditions come afloat thanks to the holiday season. Being a country of mostly Roman Catholics, you will see that the whole month of December is dedicated to Christmas, not because of the shopping, but because of the nativity scenes erected throughout the city (from churches and cathedrals, to schools, parks, homes, and even shopping centers!), the city is filled with lights all month long representing the spirit of the season. People make it a point to drive around to search out these nativity scenes and light displays. Another thing to keep in mind is that there is serious and heavy partying going on during Christmas and New Years. Lots of great food, and plenty of alcohol to be had (please don't drink and drive). There are also other traditions like El Dia de Los Inocentes (I can't recall if it's on the 28th of December or November, but everyone tries to prank everyone else; even in the newscasts! It's all fun and games and it is to honor the innocent souls of children and other kind-hearted spirits. A New Year's tradition in some homes and neighborhoods is the Año Viejo (The Old Year Doll): people make a life-sized doll by filling old clothes with newspaper and fireworks and they call "him" Old Year. At midnight on New Years Eve, everyone gathers on the block and hand this doll and light him up (to burn all those bad things from last year away and start with the new). Pretty fun and awesome, especially when they make them look like politicians or unlikable characters from everyday life.

6) There is so much more I am missing, so I suggest you make sure you go to Bogota and discover how great it is for yourself! Use your common sense and enjoy what this great city has to offer.

The next day to Bogota. We had a little problem with air in the brakes and had it repaired at Auto Imperio in Bogota along with the cracked support they found to the right front spring. That steel plate is about 3/4 inches thick and…Read More

The next day to Bogota. We had a little problem with air in the brakes and had it repaired at Auto Imperio in Bogota along with the cracked support they found to the right front spring. That steel plate is about 3/4 inches thick and it must of taken quite a jolt to crack it. The same day we pushed on to Girardot and found this local farming community away from Bogota a great place to enjoy a truly Colombian town. The trip on down to Calli the next day was over the Central Mountain Chain. Many farmers have their own cable cars to get to the roads. On a 50 mile route we saw 5 major accident with serious injuries and a death or so. All of the accidents were caused by buses or overloading of vehicles and all could have been prevented by using care in driving.

Calli is a lovely town full of high rises and quaint little shops and bistros. A river runs at great speed in the center of town giving a special quality to the town. The next day it was on to a full days drive south to Pasto and over some of the highest mountains in the Occidental range. The areas is dry and almost desert like for over half of the way although it has a quality of peace and harmony. Pasto is an Indian farming town that has grown considerable and offers most all modern facilities including cash machines.We stayed at a 4 star hotel and enjoyed a meal at Sorantio s equal to "El Torito" our Honduran standard. I enjoyed the pastry shops that seem to be on every block of the town.

To read more about my trip click: more

April 15, 1996 Folks, So many of our friends have asked us about our trip to South America we felt that a note from time to time would keep everyone abreast of the trip. The trip will be done in 8 legs or so each…Read More

April 15, 1996

Folks, So many of our friends have asked us about our trip to South America we felt that a note from time to time would keep everyone abreast of the trip. The trip will be done in 8 legs or so each about two to three weeks. We will do a leg every three to four months.

Our trip first started with a farewell party at our CPW apartment. Our only regret was we had to call it over too early to get a 6:00AM start the next morning. We left about 7:30 only to rush over to Carmen Charles our travel agent to pick up our return air tickets that she forgot to deliver. The only thing we forgot was the ham we cooked to eat along the first couple of thousand miles.

The preparation of the Land Rover was accomplished by DAP of Springfield, Vermont and updated with work by Tom Sircausa at our local gas station in Englewood,N.J.. We know that the car could make it on any trip anywhere. The 1967 Land Rover has a top speed of 55 mph so our excitement was high when we passed 4 cars. It only took us to Texas to pass the last slow car. We stopped for the night at Charlottville North Carolina, Biloxie Mississippi and Corpus Christy , Texas the third night. Lots of hours behind the wheel was the way to move through the USA

A wonderful experience when visiting any tropical Latin American country is guarapos--the squeezed juice of cane sugar. And don't worry about the brown color of this delicacy! Squeezed by hand or squeezed by small steam engine, guarapos is a refreshing experience. …Read More

A wonderful experience when visiting any tropical Latin American country is guarapos--the squeezed juice of cane sugar. And don't worry about the brown color of this delicacy! Squeezed by hand or squeezed by small steam engine, guarapos is a refreshing experience. Close

My last night at the missionary compound I played cards with the family of a mission pilot who was out on duty. After a few hands the lights flickered, then died. The guerrillas had sabotaged several high voltage towers. 'In Guatemala,' I told my aunt…Read More

My last night at the missionary compound I played cards with the family of a mission pilot who was out on duty. After a few hands the lights flickered, then died. The guerrillas had sabotaged several high voltage towers. 'In Guatemala,' I told my aunt as word filtered in with respect to the causes of the blackout, 'our guerrillas would never get off with dynamiting main power lines.' Other reports had the guerrillas attempting to blow a bridge along the main conduit between Villavicencio and the capitol, stopping traffic coming out of mountain tunnels in order to spray paint on vehicles slogans of the revolution, and hijacking a plane at the Villavicencio airport.

To the Villavicencio airport we flew from the mission air strip on a midweek morning. We were already in a cab about to begin the long ride back up to Bogota when it occurred to me I had misplaced something. My sketchbook! My big black sketchbook! I'd left it on the plane. Much to the unease of the others in the cab who entertained the notion I suppose that I could be mistaken for a hijacker, I ran out to the airport entrance and through the security gate, which was actually a wide open access to the air field, secured entirely, should any incident arise, by machine-gun fire.

Knowing little Spanish then, I gestured to one of the machine-guns if I might be allowed onto the field and was waved through, catching the plane with my book while it was yet refueling.

The cab ride back 'up the hill' was much more complicated than the jeep ride down. Two feet of rain on the eastern exposures to the Andes had precipitated what one could only describe as boulder slides. Stones, many the size of Volkswagens, littered the road to the capitol along most of its path. As if the mountain road wasn't curvy enough, the cab seemed to veer left or right as much to negotiate rocks as curves.

Pulling around a series of boulders that mimicked a semi-trailer rig, we came to a bridge with a manhole cover sized gap in it's middle and eased effortlessly around the obstacle, the 'blown job' of the resistance. Mother nature had superseded the guerrillas in hampering travel between the llanas and the capitol. Indeed, within two more weeks the road would be entirely impassable due to rock slides.

In Bogota, my aunt decided she did not want her stash of poison arrows tucked away among her other souvenirs and gave them all to me. I was travelling light and had only one small bit of luggage, a bag woven in Mayan Cakchiquile which was two inches too short for most of the arrows. They stuck out of the bag, the end of which was left unzipped to reveal the cotton swab shafts rather than the razor sharp tips which were for safety's sake plunged into dirty socks deep within.

With all good-byes said, I was on my own as I approached customs at the BogotaAeropuerto Internacional. Due to the daring feats of the guerrillas, security was tightened and all passengers were being hand frisked and their luggage thoroughly searched. It at this point crossed my mind that attempting to board the plane with poison arrows in full view might constitute a touchy circumstance and I was only minutes away from being frisked myself.

It was my turn for security check. I first handed my bag over to be searched, which was almost immediately set back down aside for me to claim. As I had to assume a position to be hand searched, I handed my sketchbook to a soldier with a machine-pistol hanging at his side and went through to be frisked. A dozen cotton swabs from the ends of the poison darts jutted harmlessly out of the sketchbook, having the appearance of art paraphernalia. I picked up my bag, claimed my sketchbook, and boarded the plane.

Travel by plane in Latin America has one considerable drawback--carry on luggage. As I boarded my plane I saw every conceivable item dragged up to and stuffed in the craft's stowaway compartments: champagne, statues, golf clubs, knickknacks, and backpacks. A couple with a child claimed the two inside seats in my row. They stuffed the overheads full and then proceeded to fill any remaining space underneath.

I was able to chuck my Mayan patterned bag into a small space I was allowed under the seat in front of me, but all the junk of the passengers to my side forced me to roll my poison darts inside a newspaper and leave them precariously stationed on the very outside of the space beneath my seat.

After the meal was served, the plane hit some turbulence and the newspaper unrolled. I was suddenly startled by a stewardess who shoved an arrow right up to my face and spouted the ultimatum, 'Señor!'

I arrived in Guatemala on a Saturday and the next day El Presidente Serrano was scheduled to give a big speech simulcast on both TV and radio. Five minutes before the event guerrillas blew a key power grid. A photo of the toppled tower splashed the next day's Prensa Libre. For the first time since arriving in Central America, I was without power.

I was not yet finished with the poison dart dilemma. As I left Guatemala months later, I still faced the task of getting them through Dallas customs. As anyone returning from the third world finds out, honesty is not always the best policy when filling out a customs declaration card. And because I admitted to having visited a farm while outside U.S. borders, actually a coffee plantation, I was pulled over for the inspection.

'That one,' the Dallas customs official pointed. It was the suitcase with the poison darts from Colombia. In my hurry to pack, I had tossed them all loosely into the bottom rear sateen pocket of one of my two king-sized suitcases. I lugged the baggage up to the counter where it was zipped open. The inspector took no notice of the clearly visible poison darts whose unsecured razor sharp tips had penetrated though the pocket's lining and lodged themselves into the myriad of luggage contents. He merely plunged both hands into the mass of soiled clothes and assorted souvenirs and began a rapid swirling motion in search of various contraband. I wanted to stop him, but wasn't in any particular big hurry to say, 'Er...watch out for the poison darts, will you.'

Swirling his ungloved hands within inches of the tips of my Macu poison arrows, the customs official suddenly stopped, pulled up his hands and said, 'You’re out of here.' And indeed so I was.

I later heard that two of the mission families I'd encountered at the school compound had family members kidnapped and murdered by guerrillas when a ransom wasn't paid. The mission compound itself was evacuated due to the widening guerrilla war and to my knowledge continues to remain abandoned. I would return to Colombia again several years afterwards, but only to visit Cali.

It was a cool, damp, fall-like but sunny morning the first time I buzzed into Bogota's Aeropuerto Internacional. Customs ignored me entirely and I was about to exit the airport altogether when I spotted a man holding a placard that read, simply 'Allan.' The man…Read More

It was a cool, damp, fall-like but sunny morning the first time I buzzed into Bogota's Aeropuerto Internacional. Customs ignored me entirely and I was about to exit the airport altogether when I spotted a man holding a placard that read, simply 'Allan.'

The man escorted me to a jeep that howled down thoroughfares lined with freelance mercantes hawking powdered milk, palm trees, vintage gramophones, and practically anything else that one could imagine.

After spending the night in a missionary guest house in Bogota, I was sent "down the hill" late the next morning in the first available jeep on a three-and-a-half hour jaunt to Villavicencio.

Our route out of the Latin metropolis took us through the beleaguered barrios of Bogota that accounted for much of capitol’s urban growth as the century drew to a close. The city’s population, often placed at three to four million, sprawled endlessly through chunks of concrete, tin sheeting, pieces of stucco--whatever materials could be had or carried away and used to build makeshift shelters.

One small dwelling was constructed merely of used bricks stacked up on four sides, without the refinement of wood frame or mortar. The apartments of more middle class areas had flat roofs secured with barbed wire and German Shepherds. A current census of the Bogota might indicate anywhere from three to four million souls residing there. A more accurate estimate including the barrios might suggest four or five times that.

We were speeding along into an entanglement of main roads converging at the outskirts of Bogota when we were ground to a halt. Twenty or thirty head of longhorn cattle were crossing a half dozen lanes of traffic guided entirely by the twelve foot whip and steadied hand of a llanero who was as oblivious to the drivers of the vehicles around him as they appeared to be to him.

The jeep first climbed into the clouds to 11,000 feet before abandoning its ascent and dropping nearly to sea level. Along the way, numerous lengths of thick cable stretched from roadside to mountainside across ravines and hundreds of feet of drop off. Field workers holding greased chains slid back and forth across them for convenient passage.

Sometimes cattle and other domestic animals would be rigged to make the crossing, bound in heavy gauge wire and rope slings and then sent sliding on their way, they too traversed the ravines.

In Villavicencio I joined my missionary aunt and uncle and we were all led to a Jurassic Park style jeep which began the last 45 minutes of the journey back into the foothills of the Andes to our missionary compound destination. Despite my previous months of unsettling mountain travel in Guatemala, given the mud of Colombia’s wet season, the hairpin drop-off Colombian terrain, and the tropical darkness settling early and swift, I considered the trip to be neither expeditious nor safe by comparison.

I treated myself as on vacation and so spent much of my time sitting out back in the bush sketching the mission's airfield which was propitiously set just above the raging Rio Meta, churned in my ten days there by a 23 inch rainfall. Above the airfield loomed the spectacular peaks of the Andes in a grand array as if some ideal Doric temple backdrop the ancient Athenians could only envy.

Remote Colombia exuded a magical quality. Frogs clung to the concrete and stucco walls inside my dwelling and jumped in panic upon anyone’s approach, sometimes into one’s face. Spiders, horrible in size, patrolled the casa. I witnessed one stepped on turning into a hundred tiny spiders scurrying about the floor. A compound classroom displayed a glass covered presentation case with hundreds of spiders pegged inside--no two alike and each dried into eternal dread.

One of the most impressive things about Bogota is the landscape that surrounds the city. There are always mountains in the background, most of them covered by beautiful pine or eucaliptus forests. And between all of the mountains that surround Bogota, there’s one that is…Read More

One of the most impressive things about Bogota is the landscape that surrounds the city. There are always mountains in the background, most of them covered by beautiful pine or eucaliptus forests.

And between all of the mountains that surround Bogota, there’s one that is especially interesting: MONSERRATE. It’s not the tallest, but what makes it so special is what it means for Bogotans and Colombians. Since the building of the church on the summit, 600 meters (1800 feet) above the city, it Monserrate has become a place of gathering for the Bogotans every Sunday. Most people come to pray in the church or walk all the way up to the top of the mountain to make up for promises they have made to God or to some of the many saints adored by Colombians. Since it has become such a popular sight, many handicraft shops and restaurants have opened on the top of the mountain. So today, not only religious people go all the way up to the mountain, but also tourists, athletes, families and many more. To enjoy the beautiful church and shops, and the great food, but also to enjoy the beautiful view of the city and of the other mountains surrounding Bogota, like Guadalupe, another mountain that has a giant statue of the virgin of Guadalupe on the summit. Walking is not the only way to the top. There’s also a cable car and a small train that goes all the way up.

Bogota has a huge offer for dinning. Few cities in South America (maybe Buenos Aires) have a wider number of choices. You can find great restaurants of typical Colombian food, as well as international, seafood or many others. The most renowned are: In typical Colombian food,…Read More

Bogota has a huge offer for dinning. Few cities in South America (maybe Buenos Aires) have a wider number of choices. You can find great restaurants of typical Colombian food, as well as international, seafood or many others. The most renowned are:
In typical Colombian food, 'Casa Vieja'. They have many locations in the city, all of them with a colonial atmosphere. Try the one in Avenida Jimenez # 3-73.

Don't leave Bogota without trying the 'Ajiaco Santafereño', a soup made with different kind of potatoes, chicken, herbs and spices.

Also recommended is 'El Zaguan de las aguas' on Calle 19 # 5-62. In seafood try 'La Fragata'. The one located on calle 100, on top of the World Trade Center rotates every few minutes to offer a 360 ° view of Bogota.

For Swiss food try 'La cuissine Suisse' which has many locations around town, or try 'El chalet Suizo'.

In Middle East food, the choice is 'El Khalifa'. They have many locations too, but the one on Carrera 11 # 88-46 is especially good.

Spanish food is recommended in 'Pajares Salinas' on Carrera 10 # 96-08.

For international food, 'Tramonti' on the way to 'La Calera' is very good and has beautiful views of Bogota, specially during the sunset and at nighttime.

All these restaurants are some of the most traditional ones in Bogota, and are rather pricey. And these are just few of the many good restaurants available. The Swiss restaurants mentioned are a lot more affordable than the other ones with different types of cuisine, but all the prices are reasonable, and you get what you pay for. There are also tons of fast food places in the city, and there are many good but cheaper restaurants than those on my list.

Bon apetit. Close

1 PESO = 100 centavos. There are coins in the following peso denominations: 5, 10, 20, 50, 100, 200 500 and 1000 pesos. There are paper notes in the following peso denominations: 1,000, 2,000, 5,000, 10,000, 20,000 & 50,000 pesos. You will need your passport…Read More

1 PESO = 100 centavos.
There are coins in the following peso denominations: 5, 10, 20, 50, 100, 200 500 and 1000 pesos.
There are paper notes in the following peso denominations: 1,000, 2,000, 5,000, 10,000, 20,000 & 50,000 pesos.
You will need your passport to conduct any banking in Colombia.
The automatic tellers only allow four numbers for your PIN (Personal Identification Number).Close

Amazing cathedral dug underground in a salt mine. Hard to explain exactly what this place is and how interesting it is; it is worth a visit for sure! It is around 1 to 1.5 hours from Bogota in the town of Zipaquira. The decor inside is…Read More

Amazing cathedral dug underground in a salt mine. Hard to explain exactly what this place is and how interesting it is; it is worth a visit for sure! It is around 1 to 1.5 hours from Bogota in the town of Zipaquira.

The decor inside is suprisingly hilighted with neons and flood light, and includes remakes of a couple of famous Christian artwork. The tour guides are very good, and a couple speak English as well.

Ask around Bogota about discounted days (used to be Tuesday) and save the 7$ admission charge.