Saturday 15 February 2014

Bogota: Botero, bikes & betting

Our Bogota bus was roomy enough so we were well prepared for a Fri evening 90min taxi queue (because it was raining).  After a slice of pizza (only visible veggie option) and a good night's sleep we were ready to take in the sites of a city close to the population of London but at 2500m+ 

We started the day with an invigorating walk up hundreds of lung-busting stairs - climbing 500m to the top of Mt Monserrat which affords a great view over a not so great looking city - but it is one hefty sprawl of 8.5million people none the less.


Back on lower levels, we saw a town square with Blackpool beach style Llama (instead of donkey) rides, randoms dressed as smurfs and angry people protesting about something (no plaza worth it's salt is without a daily demo about something).


The modern art museum had Gayle delighted over the quality of the free culture on show: Botero, Picasso, Bacon, Freud... due to past training I recognised a Chegal to my credit (but no idea what it signified as usual).  


We moved onto the renowned Gold museum - the whole point of which was to show that the Mayan cultures made stuff - sometimes with gold.  We made short work of that as we had already realised this groundbreaking point.

We topped off the visit with a really good, balanced and informative bike tour which took in:
- a bull ring - no fighting that morning thankfully
- the impressive city park - complete with public Zumba/Aerobics class for 500 people
- huge and impressive graffiti murals

- a coffee factory (best coffee destined for export of course) where a small coffee made Gayle a bit jittery and mental
- a depressing view of the legal red light area
- a trip to the market where we tried exotic fruits - some looked really weird

- a game of Tejo
- a look at the truly inspired street gambling game of - guess which tub a guinea pig will run into....





I think they did a very, very good job.  Although not a pretty city we have a good impression of the place and definitely enjoyed the bits we managed to see. And despite it's reputation of being very dangerous, we saw nothing more frightening than crimes of fashion. 

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