Our first stop in South America - Bogota, Colombia

Weary and jet lagged, we touched down at the surprisingly lovely Bogota International Airport in Colombia after I don’t even know how many days flying, a stopover in Los Angeles and many unclaimed hours of sleep.

(Santa Monica Pier, Los Angeles)

We made it to our hostel (barely, I’m not actually sure how that happened as I was basically a walking zombie at the time…) and then I slept… For 16 hours…

I awoke the following morning not really feeling any better but determined to head out into the intimidating Colombian capital. We spoke to the hostel owner, a young local guy who had such passion for his city that we were filled with confidence about our location despite the things you read online.

($0.50 fresh churros from a street vendor - Yum!)

It was recommended we spend a day wandering the old historical centre of Bogota and visiting some of their museums. The Hostel Owner directed us to the Museo Nacional, his favourite of the museums (that’s saying something, there’s like a thousand in Bogota!). It’s in an old prison building near the start of the old historical centre. The museum itself was a collection of historical pieces from Colombian history and was probably one of the best museums I’ve ever been too! What made this museum even more amazing though was its phenomenal building. Large brickwork on the outside and amazing white walls with cobblestone and wooden floors in the inside. The most beautiful building I’ve seen to date!

From here we wandered further into the historical centre, a beautiful area filled with colonial buildings like nothing we experienced in Asia. Our next stop was the Museo del Oro, the Gold Museum. We simply stopped here to fill in our day and had completely written off this museum… Honestly how interesting could a gold museum possibly be!? The answer to that is very! 3 floors filled with gold work from the pre-Hispanic cultures in Colombia. Truly amazing! We wandering aimlessly through this museum for a long time, fascinated by the amazing gold work here.

We continued our exploration and found ourselves in the Bolivar Square. This is an the area of town containing all the parliamentary buildings and offices, as well as a lot of pigeons! Like everywhere!! The old square is massive and the buildings all follow with that old colonial feel. There are police everywhere here with roads blocked off to traffic. We were actually searching for the Museo Historico de la Policia, the Police Museum! Yet another free museum in Bogota

After wandering the streets for ages we were about to give up when a young policeman approached us and asked if we wanted to go to the free police museum! He had a bunch of tourists in tow… I’m thinking it must be a common problem for people to get lost finding this museum…

Here we thought we’d just wander around this museum by ourselves… But they arrange guides for you (police that work there) to give you a fully guided tour… For free… And being the only English speakers there, Mitch and myself got a private tour! Our tour guides name was Brian and he was learning English to one day travel the world. The tour was really interesting and involved a lot of information about how the Colombian Police came to exist, eventually throughout all of Colombia, and a lot about their war on drugs, including a whole section relating to the infamous Pablo Escobar and his eventual demise. We must have spent over an hour being guided around. Yet another fascinating museum! At the end of our tour it came to light that this was the first tour Brian had ever given in English! His English was perfect! And he wanted to take a picture with us! Such a nice kid!

This ended our first day in Bogota. Being still jet lagged, despite my best efforts I was asleep by 7pm…

We spent the next few days attempting to adjust to our new time zone and spent a lot of time wandering around and drinking coffee, chatting with other travellers in the hostel. This is how we came to hear about a free graffiti tour put on everyday. We were told it was a must! And so on our last day in Bogota we headed to La Candelaria, the oldest of all the old parts of Bogota (some of the buildings in this area are more than 500 years old) to meet up with our guide, a Colombian born, American raised guy who moved back to Colombia just over two years ago to get in on the Colombian graffiti movement. He now runs a gallery displaying graffiti artists work in Bogota.

For over two hours we wandered through the old city, learning about the history of graffiti in Bogota, about the styles involved, the messages behind it all, the hierarchy amongst artists and about the artists themselves. It was an eye-opening tour, especially for me. The graffiti in Bogota is on a whole other level to anywhere I’ve ever been and at first I’ll admit I did associate it with the high crime rate Bogota is known for, but it is much more than that! And the community totally embraces it. In fact they are known to band together and hire a graffiti artist to paint a wall or building in the area.

This tour was the best way to finish our time in Bogota. It was an eye-opening experience that made me feel much more comfortable in what is quite possibly the most dangerous place we’ve ever been … Or at least that’s what the guide books keep telling us…