This is going to be a long one. I went to Colombia in March for two weeks and I'm only now finally getting around to going through photos. I can't find the SLR but I hardly used it, I had been advised not to lug it around in certain parts of the country so most of these are iPhone photos. (So they aren't great.)
We visited Bogotá, Medellín, Isla Baru, and Cartagena. We booked all our domestic flights through
Viva Colombia, a dirt cheap domestic airline. In Bogotá, we stayed at a hostel, in Medellín we did airbnb, in Isla Baru we stayed at this totally rad lady's beach house called
Baruchica, and in Cartagena we airbnb'd again. I LOVED IT. I had a couple colleagues from Colombia who gave me great advice, and a bunch of random friends had gone and recommended it as a not-too-touristy, safe and awesome place. I'm super glad we went and would like to go back again one day.
Our hostel breakfast was always one egg, fruit, and two tiny pieces of toast which turns out isn't enough food for the amount of walking we were doing. The coffee in Colombia tends to be surprisingly shitty because they export all the best shit. BUT we did learn from this place about 'La Fina' margarine, which sounds terrible but is the most amazing tasting thing, better than any European butter I've ever had in my life. We even contemplated hoarding some to bring back home until I got the bright idea to google it and realized Amazon sells it.
There's this amazing
museum of gold that houses a bunch of Pre-Colombian artifacts (and, obviously, a shit ton of gold.) I can't get over how much I loved this museum. Also it's so strange how a room full of shiny things can make you feel like some kind of weird, uncultivated animal that wants all the shiny things.
I really loved Bogotá, and it was totally not what I expected. The cool thing about Colombia is that all the areas we visited were just so different from each other that they felt like separate countries. Bogotá was massive, we realized up at Montserrate where we had a view of the entire city. The Plaza Bolivar still has damage from FARC bombing government buildings, and as recently as 2009 they were blowing shit up in Bogotá. There are policemen with dogs everywhere, I assumed they were drug dogs but found out later they were bomb dogs. There's graffiti everywhere, which I absolutely loved. For some reason, no matter how old I get or how much money I make, I feel like I'll always identify with the underdog and graffiti represents something really powerful to me that I couldn't do justice to articulating. Counterculture bullshit maybe. I only know how I felt.
The city is built into the Andes, so the steep hills and cliffs are exhausting. It's at something like 8,000 feet elevation, and that makes it worse. But it helps keep the people in Bogota that we saw super fit, despite a diet made up of foods like this:
Wow I forgot how much I missed this until right now.
Bandeja Paisa is a typical midday Colombian meal, but I ate it for breakfast after my first killer hangover down there. And it solved EVERYTHING. This needs to be in America. (Side note: I ate basically an avocado a day while there, and I didn't get significantly fatter, but my hair looked like a goddamn Pantene commercial. If I could afford that many avocadoes in Brooklyn I could probably make a living selling hair.) This particular plate I have to confess I ordered at a mall – malls are all over the place there – although the caveat I would give is that they basically hand made everything. So I don't count it as fast food. The plate I ordered was a quarter avocado, ground beef, white rice, red beans, an arepa (FYI though arepas are also all over the place in Colombia, and this one was terrible), a plaintain, chicharron, an over easy egg and sausage. Best Breakfast Ever award.
