Santafe de Bogota

CHAPTER 18

When I hear the word “Bogota”, I used to think of that scene in the movie “Clear and Present Danger” with Harrison Ford, where the villains block off either end of the street with two old busses, armed gunman pepper his truck with machine guns, while men on the rooftop launch rockets down from above.  It seems a bit theatrical and flamboyant, but the crazy thing is that that very thing could have happened in real life, and probably did, as late as only a decade ago.  The good thing for us was that Bogota, and Colombia as a whole, has been trying to shake its reputation as a lawless, dangerous country, and through the concerted efforts of its latest president, Alvaro Uribe, they have made significant steps towards crushing the drug cartels and jungle rebels that plague this beautiful country.  Even so, driving into the metropolis of Santafe de Bogota, as they call it now, and feeling our way through the congested streets to the old colonial neighborhood of La Candalaria, we still felt a certain heightened awareness to the possible dangers that may still be lurking in the darker corners of the city.

Not wanting to test our luck against the big city, we only stayed long enough to see the few sights we had highlighted on our list.  We took a ride up the gondola to catch a panoramic view of the sprawling city, we visited the Museo de Oro (Gold Museum) with its impressive collection of pre-colombian gold statues, figurines, and masks, and we even rented bikes to cruise the main city avenue with thousands of other Bogotans on a brisk Sunday morning (quite a few large cities in Central and South America shut down their main avenues on Sundays and promote city wide “ride your bike for health” programs.  In Bogota it was one of the largest participations we had seen, along with the most roads closed only to bicyclists- our guide took us nearly 15 miles around the city in one morning).

One of the most interesting things we did while we were there was go to the Salt Cathedral- a giant underground salt mine that has been turned into a, let’s say, interesting interpretation of a cathedral.  The original mine had been in use since the Spanish were making indian slaves do the digging, and was used off-and-on till modern times.  In the 1950s, miners used a cave in an abandoned section of the mine to construct a cathedral, carving the pillars and alter out of the solid salt rock walls.  This ‘salt cathedral’ was used by the miners to pray for safety during their long work days.  The original level of the mine was closed sometime later due to structural instability, and the advent of large scale industrial mining techniques gave way to a second (also closed) and third level of the mine.  The third level is a functioning mine and is a huge complex of long 30’ wide by 45’ tall tunnels, a couple hundred yards long each.  A small portion of these tunnels, maybe 10 out of 40 some, have been turned into a modern day version of the original salt cathedral, though it is primarily frequented by tourists, and not used by the miners at all.  The architect of this new cathedral has taken a rather “modern art” approach, with the effect of making it feel like a tourist attraction, rather than a house of God.  Even though my visions of a sparkling white underground Notre Dame were way off, it was still very cool to go exploring through the labyrinth of abandoned mining tunnels.

The one other notable thing we did while we were in Bogota was go to a futbol match.  You won’t believe this when I tell you, but the day we arrived we were walking from our hostel to go to dinner, and who did we see walking down the street towards us… Amy and Tim!  They had gotten into town the night before after a horrendous 29 hour bus ride disaster from Tyrona beach in the north of Colombia.  By now we had all accepted these chance meetings as fate, and decided to make something of our time together here in the capital, so we arranged to go to the local futbol club’s match the following day.  Again we were lucky that the home team won, thus avoiding the probable street riots that might break out if they had lost.

Big cities take a toll on your traveling spirit, and we soon felt ourselves itching to hit the road once again and seek out more nurturing and inspiring surroundings.  The coffee valley of central Colombia was just the right place to collect ourselves and relax for a couple of days before trying to tackle our first border crossing (Ecuador) in over a month.