It’s my last day in Colombia and I have a lot of time on my hands. My flight leaves at 11:30 PM, I’ve done the touristy things on my Bogota list, except for paragliding and becoming fluent in Spanish, but paragliding can’t be arranged on such short notice and Spanish fluency is no more than a pipedream for now.
It’s a brilliant sunny day, so maybe I’ll visit the Bikeshop around the corner and take a bike tour.
In the meantime, I’m thinking of some of the things I’ve really enjoyed in Colombia but haven’t yet mentioned in this blog.
1. Old vehicles
Colombian streets are mostly full of recent model compact cars. Hyundai and Renault are the predominant brands, but small tincan Chevy Sprints are common too. But every so often you come across an older vehicle, especially out in the countryside, especially work vehicles. I’ve seen the most beautiful old dumptrucks (if old dumptrucks can be beautiful), but unfortunately, I haven’t had my camera ready to photograph many of them as they drive by. Here’s a few older vehicles that I have managed to get a picture of.
Later in the Day
The bike tour was much more than I expected, an excellent way to spend my last day here. We started at 10:30 and went until 4, and visited many interesting spots. We went to a chocolate factory, a coffee roaster, a flower market, a fruit and vegetable market, a chicha hotspot (where people sell their homemade fermented corn drink), and we ended it off in a tejo bar. Our tour guide was Mike, a transplanted Californian who is also the owner of the Bogota Bike Company and who’s lived here for 14 years. He had a visitor’s eye for what is novel and interesting, and a resident’s connection to the local community. He arranged for us to be treated to samples all along the way. We had samples of chocolate at three levels of purity, we drank wonderful coffee, we tasted about 10 exotic fruits that we don’t normally find at home, and then stopped in a tejo bar. Tejo is the Colombian national sport, where you throw disks at a patch of clay in which there is a circle of paper targets. Each folded paper holds gunpowder, and if you hit a target, it explodes. It’s like horseshoes or lawn darts but the explosions make it much more exciting.
Also, throughout the afternoon, Mike wanted to talk about Mennonites whom be had encountered in Paraguay and Bolivia, where he had previously worked as a journalist. He was already quite knowledgeable but had many questions, so that made for interesting conversation.
Now I’m finishing packing my things and waiting till it’s time to take a taxi to the airport and start my journey home.