I had a fantastic day in Bogotá today and am starting to feel like I know the city a bit. Of course, it’s a huge city with many different parts, but I’ve been through a bunch of the neighborhoods by now and am starting to get a feel of the vibe of the place. My goal now is to go from knowing the city to understanding the city, through a better grasp of the history of Colombia and Bogotá as well as more interactions with locals.
Here’s a brief outline of all the wonderful things I did today, then I’ll get into all the fun photos and details down below!
- Hotel Breakfast
- Bogotá Bike Tours – tour of La Candelaria/southern Bogotá:
- Bolivar Square – congress, cathedral
- Marketplace and Tejo (really fun!)
- Park Nacional
- Parkway
- Coffee roastery and cafe
- Back through some sketchy districts
- Some excellent coffee shops
- An awesome uber ride
- One amazing dinner
It was a wonderful day! I took tons of pictures, so I’ll try to make this blog post a fun visual overview of my experience in Bogotá so far. I’m really enjoying this city: the people, the scenery, the food, and yes, the coffee, have all blown me away.
I started off with the hotel breakfast buffet, which was perfectly fine. From there I got an Uber from the north end of Bogotá, where I am, all the way to the south end of the La Candelaria neighborhood. I was hoping to make the 10:30am bike tour, so I left the hotel at 9:35 optimistically. Unfortunately, traffic and a few wrong turns got me stuck, so I called up the bike place and told them I was running late. They assured me it wouldn’t be a problem
Eventually I got to the meeting point for Bogotá Bike Tours and I was pretty surprised by the place: it was a hole-in-the-wall tucked into a side alleyway run by an expat named Mike from California. The group had already left, but Mike set me up with a bike and a helmet and he and I took off to catch up.
We briefly stopped at the Bolivar Square, which is the core of the Capital District, flanked by the Capital Building, the Supreme Court, and an old Church.
This is the Capital Building on the left 
This is another government building on the square. Looks like I forgot to take pictures of the Church and Courthouse. Oops.
From there, Mike took me down Calle 7, which is a big, bustling pedestrian street. Because there was basically no one in our way and I felt like I had a lot of room to stop, I tried to take a video. A little note about this: it’s of course a little tricky to get your phone out of your jean pocket, open the camera, and record while biking, so I tried to be hasty with it. Even still, it felt like I was taking a 30 second video. It turns out I did not take that long of a video of the biking experience:
Brief rant: WordPress won’t let me upload a video! I’d understand if it weren’t capable of doing so, but I am very frustrated at how they handle it. When I try to upload it, I get the following message:
So I googled what file types wordpress does support “for security reasons”, and it turns out .mov files are totally fine but you need to upgrade your blog to premium in order to upload a movie! That’s absurd!!
Ok, back to our regularly scheduled programming. I just wanted to share my pain briefly.
The point of that video was that it’s actually .7 seconds long, but the biking made it feel forever. It’s not that great, I promise. It’s also very hard to record video while biking through a city!
Mike and I met up with the rest of the group and he dropped me off. Our guide Diego took us to many awesome experiences around Bogotá from markets to cafes. One thing about Diego that I especially appreciated was his knowledge of the murals/graffiti around the city, and how they played into the story of Bogotá. My first stop with the group was a mural commissioned by the mayor to try to stem gun violence in the city:
We stood out quite a bit in our ponchos! 
I think that pistola has two meanings which makes this a pun
Next, we went to a market hall where we tried a bunch of incredible kinds of local fruit and some specialty Colombian chocolates.
The market hall we went to 
Trying fresh Colombian avocado with salt – it was delicious and enormous! 
The fruit stand that we bought from. Look at all those new flavors! 
This was a mangosteen, which is a dark red fruit with milky white fruity bulbs in the middle. 
Colombian passionfruit, “but this is much sweeter and healthier,” we were assured. Also called Pitaya 
Your trusty traveller makes an appearance!
After the market hall, we went across the street to a very unassuming storefront with an enormous interior! It was a Tejo pit, which is a Colombian game. The best I can describe it is Cornhole with gunpowder. Take a look:
Unfortunately I still can’t upload videos, because the video I got of this is crazy. Here is a video of Anthony Bourdain learning to play it. In Tejo, you throw metal hockey-puck sized objects called Tejos into a clay pit, just like cornhole. Except the target is a bit different: you’re trying to either hit, or land inside of, a metal circle in the clay. Here’s the catch: you line the metal circle with small packets of gunpowder, so that when you hit then they explode!
It was super fun. I hit the gunpowder twice, albeit in the “gringo” set up (lots more packets, and you stand much closer).
After Tejo, we went to the central banking district of Bogotá, which was also home to the first Colombian beer factory, built by Germans in the 1800s. We learned the story of the indigenous fermented corn drink, chicha, and how German ad schemes made people think that chicha made you stupid. In fact, Diego even told us that chicha was outlawed after an insurrection the 1920s because it was determined to be the cause of the protests. Since then, it’s been relegalized, but it’s not as popular as it used to be.
Next we biked up the hill to the Park Nacional, which is a beautiful, spacious public park on the east side of the La Candelaria district. Surrounding the Park Nacional is a very preppy (and very expensive) private university which apparently lives in its own bubble. This stands in contrast to the majority of universities in Bogotá, which are located centrally in the most populous neighborhoods. Diego even told us that the students of this preppy university have their own extra-posh Spanish accents, which is pretty crazy.
We then biked through town to the Parkway, which is a large avenue with a big park in between the two directions – just like Park Ave in NYC!
Then it started really pouring, which was actually pretty fun. We had our ponchos on, but I still got pretty soaked. We biked for about 2 miles to get to a coffee roastery on the west side of town and got to learn a teensy bit about local Colombian cafés. One of my takeaways was that almost all “Excelsior”-grade coffee (the top grade in Colombia) gets exported for higher prices, so lots of the coffee that stays in Colombia is commercial grade or defected.
The roasting and blending lab. That’s probably an 80 kilo Probat they have there! 
Check out the afterburner on that thing! That tank burns the exhaust of the roaster at something like 900ºF, and that roaster is making a lot of exhaust! 
Opening up one of the barrels of freshly roasted coffee brought me back to my days at Devocion. This one was roasted a bit darker and felt like diving into a pool of chocolate milk.
The coffee roastery was a super fun stop for me, but we only got into the surface level of the coffee industry. Mike met us at the attached café, and he and I talked for a while about the Colombian coffee industry. He organizes coffee tours of Bogotá with local guides, so I think I’ll sign up for one in the next few days to talk to some locals more in tuned to the specialty industry.
After the café, we had a bit of a talking-to by Diego. He emphasized that they wanted to show us an honest portrait of Bogotá, so we’d be riding through a sketchier district next where we weren’t allowed to take our phones out of our pockets and had to stick in a tight formation. Diego had an interesting story about the neighborhood surrounding that one, though. He explained that real estate developers realized that the location of this real estate would be perfect for new development, but first had to kind of clean up the neighborhood. Diego said that they had a full plan to buy up all of the real estate, slowly gentrify the neighborhood, and develop and sell it for a big profit.
“So what’s the first part of gentrification?” Diego asked “Artists!” We drove through a bunch of huge graffiti murals that the real estate developers had commissioned famous Colombian artists to create. These were on the outskirts of the sketchy neighborhood, so we were allowed to take some photos:
I was struck by the intricacy and beauty of the murals. Many had potent political messages about indigenous tribes’ rights, the human costs of violence, and Colombian pride.
Finally, we returned through the bustling La Candelaria district to get back to the bike shop. I think that biking through Bogotá must be one of the best ways to get to know the city as you negotiate seemingly lawless traffic, busy pedestrians, and cracked pavement. For example, this intersection was just one of many that made me appreciate how exciting Bogotá is:
The last few blocks were a pretty steep incline that had us huffing and puffing by the end. We ended up biking something like 14 kilometers, which is not bad for a day’s work!
We all thanked Diego endlessly for his knowledge, honesty, and friendliness throughout the tour. 10/10, would recommend!
Afterwards, I walked back through Bolivar square, went to two more coffeeshops, and got a couple of nice helpings of street food. My favorite of the day was the Obleas, which is a thin wafer-sandwich with two pieces of waffle-cone style crust and whatever jams or sauces you’d like in the middle. I got dulce de lece, strawberry jam, and chocolate chips. ¡Muy deliciosa!
Then I had one of the coolest parts of my day, which kind of came out of the blue! It started pouring again around 4:30, so I called an Uber back to Park 93 neighborhood to get some dinner and go back to my hotel. I met the guy on the street corner and we struck up a conversation on the pretty long, traffic-laden drive back.
He spoke a tiny bit of English and I spoke about 30 words of Spanish, so we started off pretty slow. I explained that I was from America, and I was in Bogotá for about 2 weeks before I go to Quindio. He lit up when I said Quindio – he’s from Quindio! I said that I was going to Quindio “para estudiar cafe,” and he got very excited again. “Solía ser un collectar de cafe!” A coffee harvester!
This is when things got very exciting. My uber driver was a coffee farmer from Quindio! How about that! At this point, I broke out the Google translate so that we could have a real conversation. I asked him about Quindio, and he explained the farms he worked on: pesticide-free, organic, high in the mountains, and very beautiful. He told me that his family is now spread across Spain, Quindio, Medellin, and Bogotá, but he grew up in Quindio and has a special place in his heart for it.
We then talked about the difficulties of the low price that foreign companies pay for coffee, and got a bit into the direct trade model of the specialty coffee market. He raised some really interesting points about how the farms that he worked for were enormous business ventures that sold directly to commercial buyers, and he was worried farmers like him would get left out of the increase in prices from the specialty market. I was really intrigued by this new perspective about the commercial market – will it get left behind, or even cheaper because of the specialty boom? Honestly, I have no idea, and I want to learn more about it.
The 45-minute Uber went by in a flash and we were back at my hotel. I thanked him for a great time and snagged a selfie before I left.
That was really the highlight of my day. One takeaway phrase? “Certificado organico,” an expensive certification process that organic coffee farms can get to increase their desirability to buyers.
The concierge recommended a local restaurant for dinner called Andres D.C. It was about a 20 minute walk, but I saw one of those electric scooter rentals on the sidewalk and still had the app for it installed on my phone from a trip to San Francisco, so I tried it out! Bogotá has a ton of dedicated bike lanes, especially in the Park 93 neighborhood, so I felt pretty comfortable trying it. It was super fun and zippy and got me right to dinner.
For dinner, I asked the waitress to pick out whatever authentic Colombian food she thought I might enjoy, and she did a great job. I had fried plantains with cheese as an appetizer, then an enormous steak-based dish with onions, tomatoes, and rice. I wasn’t really expecting it, but it was absolutely delicious!
The dinner was amazing and left me absolutely stuffed, in true Colombian fashion. I zipped back to my hotel and called it one heck of a day!
Today’s phrase: yo estudia física – I study physics. Came up many more times than I was expecting and always seems to intrigue!
Signing off from day 2 in Bogotá. Check in again tomorrow!
Alex
Alex's Coffee Adventure 
Alex, it’s fascinating to read about your adventures. You were so lucky to have had the chance encounter with the Über driver. However, I think you will find that you will have many such chance encounters. You are outgoing, curious, friendly and confident. These attributes exponentially increase the odds of “chance” encounters. Most people would not even start a conversation with an Uber driver who doesn’t even speak the same language. Audentis Fortuna iuvat.
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