Bogota

Bogota  Saturday, 2018.01.27

Our trip to Bogota yesterday was uneventful, although we were unable to visit Joyce’s brother Bruce and his wife Leslie before leaving, as all the northbound roads out of Miami were gridlocked for hours due to a dump truck rollover on I-95 North which completely closed that road. 

Colombian customs and immigration were very slow, and we arrived at our hotel and got to bed about 12:30 AM this morning.  Up at 6:30 for an 8:00 start with our Road Scholar group, who seem to be a lovely mix from all over the USA (and one couple from Canada).  We had an introductory talk about Colombia and Bogota, with promises of lots more to come.  We are at 8600 feet elevation, and the weather (just 300 miles from the equator) is lovely.  Morning chill in the 50s and intense sunny days in the 70s.  Truly lovely.

After preliminaries and introductions, we left for the astonishing Paloquemao Market, a truly enormous market for food and flowers. It is so big it boggles the imagination.  Outside are the flower vendors, with quantities that are unbelievable.  Here’s one of a number of huge trailers emptying their loads:

There are vendors for just about anything floral you could want.  Here’s the vendor of white:

Inside is a warren of narrow aisles, with each kind of food concentrated in one area.

Here’s the fellow who strips corn off the cobs and sells the kernels (very large) for making flour:

The herbs and natural drugs vendor sells dried coca leaves and dried marijuana leaves, as well as a pomade made of both, assured to cure most anything.  Read the label:

At one of the dozens of fish markets, this fellow was selling what our guide said was a chama—a freshwater fish from the upper Amazon:

 There’s prepared food, too.  Very popular was the stuffed pig, which is served from the opening in the rear:

There were multiple egg sellers, each with a shop of this size:

There were dozens of fruit sellers.  We stopped at one and tasted five fruits we had never seen before:

At one shop, this man continually emptied pea pods.  Joyce’s take on it was that at least he had no stress at work:

After the market we went to the Bolivar Square, which has a statue of Simon Bolivar, and is fronted on one side by the Cathedral.  It functions as the plaza mayor of Bogota, but, unfortunately, has no shops of cafes on it:

We then walked a while up and down the somewhat hilly streets of the old city, called La Candelaria.  The air is thin and we were huffing and puffing a bit.  the old city is very attractive, and has sights such as this Gothic church, Iglesia Nuestra Senora del Carmen, nicknamed the Candy Cane church:

After lunch we went to the truly spectacular Gold Museum.  The treasures here are indescribable.  The museum does a wonderful job explaining the indigenous tribes which existed in pre-Columbian times, and has extremely well-done displays of the gold items with explanations in Spanish and English.  Here are two examples of the Malagana tribe funerary masks.  This one dates to some time between 200 BCE and 1300 CE:

There are many examples of gold nose rings, and this funerary mask has one:

Finally, we drove up and up to the foot of the funicular which takes you up 1400 vertical feet to Monserrate, high above the city, at 10,000 feet.  We climbed from the top of the funicular another couple of hundred steps up, visited the small church there, watched the sunset, and had a lovely dinner at a restaurant on top of the mountain.

We then crashed!