Yesterday was our first full day in Bogota, a city overflowing with street art, crazy traffic, fruit and arepas. We started the day with our hostel breakfast of pastries, eggs and hot chocolate (which was mostly just hot milk) and then took off to explore the city. It was a pleasant and sunny Sunday and there were all kinds of vendors set up along the main strip as well as local street performers. A popular tactic among the street performers of the area is to dress up like creatures from horror films and start chasing you when you walk by until you pay them to stop, it seemed to be effective.

We bought a cup of fresh guanabana pulp (one of my favorites) and followed the street until we reached entrance to Monserrate, the local mountain and pilgrim destination. This mountain tops out at 10,341 ft and there were three options for getting to the top: teleférico (cable car), funicular or climbing, we went with the teleférico. This was by far the steepest cable car I had ever ridden on and I can’t believe the cables could hold so many people. At the top there was a large church with a mass in progress, some food and rosary stands and about a million people. The view of the city and beyond was spectacular though the area felt a bit claustrophobic from all the humans so we decided to skip the long, long line to ride back down and opted to walk instead.

The downhill was a series of paved steps, food stands, little thrown up bars and more religious paraphernalia. It took us about an hour to make the journey down and we both ended up with sore but happy legs and some less happy sunburns. Upon reaching the bottom we decided to get some food from a couple of the myriad of food stalls and rest in a nearby park.

After a rest and some of the most dry and flavorless cookies ever created we walked across La Candelaria (the old town) to the Museo Del Oro. The museum was great, there were so many ancient gold artifacts and tribal jewelry pieces. We finished our day happy but exhausted at Bogotá’s local brew pub, it was just like being back in Denver.

Our second full day was focused around seeing the salt cathedral in Zipaquira, and maybe taking in a few other offerings in and around Bogota. Since discovering that an organized excursion to Zipaquira would cost a small fortune, and also learning that entry into the park itself was relatively cheap, we opted to make our way there the way most folks do anything around here: en autobus.

Bogotá has a pretty interesting alternative to a subway system called “transmilenio”. Using centipede like buses, narrowing the number of stops to fewer, larger, more organized stations, and driving mostly in their own lanes, they’ve created a somewhat efficient cross-breed between a bus and a train. The ride out was rough, loud and uncomfortable, but cheap and served our purpose.

Disembarking at Portal Norte, we were accosted by armies of very busy people waving their arms and trying to help you connect with where you are going. I don’t know if these guys are paid on commission or what, but of the three people we talked to, none of them had time to do more than wave and sweat and talk far faster than we could understand. About 20 minutes of watching busses streak in and out, and we finally put it together and got on one of the tiny collectivos headed for Zipaquira.

We’ll see a lot more of these in the months to come, Collectivos are generally very small, very fast and frightening busses that cover the distances between cities in much of Latin America. There’s generally a teenager or an old man leaning out of the door yelling at people on the shoulders of the roads, drumming up business. There are tons and tons of them, laying into their horns, weaving in and out of traffic.. And they are cheap. The long ride to Zipaquira cost maybe $3.5 for both of us.

Arriving in Zipaquira, we ate at the first tienda we saw: another of many arepas, this time the sweet mass produced ones. In hindsight, we should have held out, as the historical center of town was beautiful, old, and chock full of cheap and delicious food.

One of my favorite things these days is having a successful communication in spanish. To express something complicated like “we are splitting this meal – esta comida is para ambos juntos”, or “yes, I have cash but I have to search for it – si, tengo efecfivo pero tengo que buscarlo”. And another, when an old lady smiled huge and asked if we were looking for the cathedral. Instinct tells you that someone is trying to sell you something when they talk to you, but we slowed down to listen and very happily received concise directions.

I don’t know why every person and guidebook tells you the salt cathedral is a must-see. It’s interesting, for sure – a former salt mine, parts of which are still in operation, has been transformed into a religious tourist destination and gift shop. There is something beautiful and meditative about some of these remarkably dark and cavernous salt caves, but the “cathedral” itself is mainly a series of artistic representations of the stations of the cross. They all came off as just a repetition of the same thing: a dark cavern of salt, and a cross in front of it. “In this one the artist is depicting the first time Jesus fell, you see how the cross is lower than the one before? This depicts the falling”.

The guide had this rhythm to her presentation, it went something like this: this whole place is made of the material… Salt. When the miners carved this area, it was made in 1 year, and the material it was constructed of is.. Salt. The floors are carved entirely of… Salt. When you return you can take picture with flash, and you can touch and even you can lick the salt if you want..

We could have skipped it, but it was worth it to wander the narrow little streets of Zipaquira.

The collectivo back was a breeze to catch.

And then there was the transmilenio during rush hour. It’s kind of hard to describe this: there are clumps of people standing where the bus doors will open.. People crush as close as they can to where the doors will open because they want a seat before it fills up – sometimes they don’t get on hoping the next is less full. The fucking problem is that the busses aren’t all going to the same place. Some people standing in front of you are blocking you from getting on the bus you need because they aren’t getting on. People are fighting like hell to get off, while people are fighting like hell to both get on and to protect their place in line for the next bus. We were lucky in that we got seats.. But we watched in horror as he bus filled beyond capacity. The doors wouldn’t close, and guys by the doors work together to close the doors behind them, squeezing them in tighter. Sometimes the outer doors at the stations won’t open, and frightened faces on the other side sprint for the next door before the bus leaves, or even better, people on both sides work together to pry the doors apart.

Well, nothing a few more arepas and cold beers won’t erase…