New World Symphony, Bike Paths and Other Pleasant Surprises : Bogotá, Colombia. December 2009.

My husband and I were standing on Montserrate, which overlooks Bogotá, when the music surprised us. "New World Symphony" by the Czech composer Antonin Dvorak (DVOR-zhak). David and I had gone up for a sunset drink on our last night in Colombia, stopping at the restaurant shown to the left. We had no idea that the Orquesta Filarmónica de Bogotá would be playing its holiday concert inside the church atop Montserrate, seen to the right.

"New World Symphony" is an odd choice for a Christmas concert, but a wonderful one. Full of sweeping horns and lively strings, Dvorak wrote it as kind of love letter to the United States during a visit in the 1890s. The concert organizers thoughtfully had set up a screen and sound system outside of the church for people who couldn't get seats inside. David and I watched the screen and listened to the concert as the green hills around us disappeared into the night. At intermission, we got seats inside the church, a lovely building with soaring ceiling and arches, all done up for Christmas. The orchestra played some carols at end of the show and then there was a boom. Silver confetti shot out from a high balcony, showering the church for several minutes.

On our ride down the mountain in a cable car known as a funicular, we saw the fireworks show. At the end of our ride, we could look up and see that the Christmas lights had been turned on.
It was the best sendoff we've had from any city.

We'd gotten off to a bit of a rough start in Bogotá, first arriving in the city around 9 p.m. on a Sunday night. Our nervous taxi driver warned us repeatedly about the dangers of the old Candelaria district, where we were staying. There were few people around, and it did look a little scary.

We awoke to find the streets busy with students and government workers. The Candelaria has a great mix of old colonial homes, churches and Art Deco buildings, as well as universities and federal offices.


We went to the free museum complex downtown, and got a good overview of the nation's history through the story of its coins. There's also a collection of the works of the most famous Colombian artist, Fernando Botero (b.1932), known for his "gordos" such as his take on the Mona Lisa, shown to the right. The museum also has works from Botero's personal collection, including the lovely nude by French painter Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947) and a canvas from Greek-Italian surrealist Giorgio di Chirico (1888-1978), both shown at left. As David and I left the arts complex, a guard gave us each a complimentary coin. "I've never been paid to go to a museum before," David joked.

Biking in Bogotá

We would have rented bikes if we had more time in Bogotá, especially some Sunday daytime hours.There's a citywide program called "Ciclovia" that closes some of the city's main streets to cars from 7:00 am to 2:00 pm on Sundays. Bogotá also had an impressive system of permanent dedicated bike lanes that runs throughout the city. In some ways, Bogotá might be a safer place for David and me than Washington. David bikes to work whenever the weather is decent, and I do in the spring, summer and fall. D.C. could learn something from how Bogotá has worked to protect its cyclists.

From the little we saw, Bogotá seems like a very livable city. We spent our Monday there wandering through some of the neighborhoods, doing Christmas shopping on Calle 53. Many of the the stores there were decked out for the holiday, liked the one shown below.
We ended our walk in the La Macarena, touted as a "bohemian" neighborhood. We spent about half an hour strolling down a street lined with restaurants and little shops. We decided to take a patio table at La Hamburgeseria. The Beatles played in the background as I ordered a árabe vegetariana, basically falafel on a bun.
"You say you'll change the constitution. Well, you know. We all want to change your head," John Lennon sang. It reminded me of the debate underway now about whether Colombian President Alvaro Uribe should be allowed to run again. (For more on that topic, see this blog.)

Too Little Time

Our stay in Bogotá ended too soon. We had an midmorning flight on Wednesday morning. We got up early to get in a last look around the city's main plaza and one more breakfast of chocolate santafereno style at an old cafe, La Puerta Falsa.

At the airport, a young woman who screened carry-on luggage paused when she came across the Gabriel García Márquez novel in my backpack. She flipped through the pages a bit, saw my many pencil marks and gave me a quick plastic-gloved thumbs up. (The book has the cover shown here, with a Botero "gordo" for an illustration.)
I'd expected to get much of the book read on our many bus rides through Colombia, but only got through about 80 pages during the trip. It's an easy book to fall into, but I'd been too busy looking out the window and listening to accordion-heavy vallenato muisc to do much reading.

Pink Floyd in Bourgeois-tá, Protest Slogans on Churches: Graffiti in the Colombian Capital. December 2009.

Try to imagine who recently picked up a spray can of paint and wrote this line from a 30-year-old Pink Floyd song

Our writer made his mark in a comfortable neighborhood in Bogotá. This wall is around the corner from a gym that occupies several floors of a building. Although the gym is dedicated largely to spinning classes, my husband and I saw folks doing what looked like capoiera moves in a big studio as we passed by on a stroll.

David and I spent a little more than two days in
Bogotá. We didn't hit the nightclubs or the most expensive restaurants, so we didn't seen the very richest folks. And, we stuck with places that seemed safe for us to wander alone, so we didn't see the poorest people. Instead, we walked through places where people have enough money for things like gyms, nice apartments and English lessons for their children. Colombia isn't like Mexico or Puerto Rico. English is not commonly spoken here. So, we can guess our graffiti writer had taken some English lessons, at least in part because of the grammar error. He seems to have known enough to know that the colon is used in English, even if he didn't quite get how it's supposed to be used.

We can guess that our graffiti writer was young and male ... because he was spraypainting a Pink Floyd lyric on a wall. What's very encouraging about this graffiti is that the writer is raising questions about his government.

Graffiti is not be the best way to do that, but it's not a bad alternative, given what Colombia's been through in the last half century or so.

Ministry of Justice Destroyed

Shown to the left, the Palace of Justice is a bit of a disappointment, a bland modern building on a plaza dominated by this lovely cathedral. Still, bland may be good. There's been more than enough excitement involving the Palace of Justice for Colombia. The predecessor to the current one was destroyed in 1985 during battles between the Colombian army and the M-19 guerrilla group, as shown in this picture taken from the Internet.

Few people outside of Colombia have heard of the M-19. It's overshadowed by the larger FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia.) The M-19 eventually gave up its arms, its members received pardons and the guerrilla group became a political party in the 1980s. It even returned a precious item, a sword of the 19th century Latin American revolutionary Simon Bolívar, which it had stolen in the 1970s.

Colombia's still fighting FARC, as it has been doing since the early 1960s. It's also had to deal with another leftist guerilla group, National Liberation Army (ELN), and the rightist paramiliatary United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), along with drug traffickers, and sometimes combinations of guerrillas and drug traffickers. That's made Colombia something of a mess. It has one of the world's largest populations of people who are almost like refugees within their own nation's borders. The United Nations puts the number of internally displaced people at about 3 million, in a nation of about 44 million. That tops the estimated 2.6 million internally displaced people in Iraq and more than 2 million in Sudan's Darfur region.

Colombia's made great strides in recent years against its guerrilla groups, on the right and left, especially under President Alvaro Uribe. Members of these groups have been persuaded to give up their arms, and the rate of violent crime has fallen. Uribe has said that 48,000 people have left these groups, and that the annual numbers of kidnappings and murders have plunged. Colombia's reputation has turned around. Cruise ships dock in Cartagena and their passengers freely wander the streets of the old colonial section of the city. Independent travelers like David and me can make their ways through the major cities of Colombia without incident.

Uribe also has been credited with trying to improve the Colombian economy. Business Week in 2007 ran a cover story with the title, "Extreme Investing: Inside Colombia. An improbable journey from crime capital to investment hot spot. Can this boom last?" In the story, Uribe is said to have made confidence (confianza) "his overarching goal." The benchmark Colombian IGBC stock index stood at about 10011 when the article ran. Although hammered with the rest of the world's equities in more recent years, the index recovered more so than most. It show a gain of about 14 percent since May 2007. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index lost more than 25 percent of it value in the same period. (UPDATE: As of Oct. 13, the S&P has risen about 2 percent in the past 12 months, while the IGBC has fallen 14 percent.)

Uribe has been pushing for changes to the Colombian constitution to allow him to run for a third term in the nation's 2010 presidential election. One hopes he will listen to critics of this idea, including former Mexican president Vicente Fox, and stand down. Colombia's in the midst of a balancing act. It still needs massive security forces to quell violence and thus needs all the more so to allow dissent and change within the government.

El Che

There are lots of students in the Candelaria section of Bogotá, and thus more than enough images of Che Guevara to rile my husband, a former chairman of the Iowa State college Republicans. The one shown to the right also turns an anti-cocaine slogan into an anti-imperialist one (don't take, or use, the Coke that kills).




Many of the churches we passed in the student district had graffiti on them, much of it about Colombia's relationship with the United States. People were alarmed when news broke earlier this year that Colombia would grant the United States access to seven military bases for joint operations against drug-trafficking and guerrillas. The Economist has said this new accord really only largely "updates a 1952 military-assistance agreement of a kind that the United States has with some 120 countries around the world, including many in Latin America." The United States also would spend $46 million extending the runway and aprons and building a hangar at Palanquero, the main Colombian air force base.

Still, there are questions about this agreement in Colombia, or at least in the Candelaria. The graffiti shown below appeared on churches there:











Similar sentiments were expressed on secular buildings, as shown below.
















Colombia still needs the yanquis and their military aid, and may need them for some while to come. Yet, it's great to see some Colombians questioning that relationship. Because even in the best of circumstances, even with an effective president, and really in any country anywhere and anytime, the answer to the question posed in the Pink Floyd lyric cited at the beginning of this blog is a clear and resounding no.

UPDATE, FEB. 27,2010: Colombia's court told Uribe `no' and he seems ready to abide by that decision. Reuters quoted Uribe said he would"accept and ..respect the decision of the Constitutional Court."


To learn more about Uribe's Bid for a Third Term:
Fox Tells Uribe Not to Run Again

Cato Institute: Will Uribe Betray Liberal Democracy in Colombia? Aug. 2009
Uribe Re-Election Bid Falters, WSJ Nov. 2009
Colombia's Alvaro Uribe-return of the South American strongman? Los Angeles Times, April 2009

Charlie Rose interview with Uribe, 2008

Chocolate With Cheese, Exotic Fruits and Braised Goat in Ant Sauce : Eating in Colombia. November-December 2009.

The waiter told us the trick for enjoying a traditional Bogotá breakfast of chocolate santafereno style. You rip the block of mild rich cheese served with your breakfast into little pieces and sink them into the cup of rich chocolate. Then, with the spoon, eat the curd that forms. It may sound weird, but it was a good combination of sweet and rich and chewy. We had this breakfast, shown to the right, at a little old cafe called la Puerta Falsa, near the city's main square. We were able to see bogotanos like the man shown below in the hat eating the same breakfast we had.


Blessed with diverse geography, Colombia can offer up some interesting foods. Our breakfast cheese in Bogotá likely came from the lovely green dairyland (lechera) in the nearby Ubate region. Colombia also produces an amazing variety of tropical fruits, such as the delicious small sourish orange called the lulo, my favorite. David enjoyed a guanabana drink one afternoon in Bogotá, as shown in this picture. That's the bumpy green fruit. We also had many fruit shakes, with David favoring raspberry (mora). Maracuya (passionfruit) was another good one.
















We had several fine dinners in Colombia, particularly fish dishes at La Vitrola in Cartagena and Antique in Villa de Leyva. Yet, the standout of the trip was the braised goat with ant sauce in Barichara. We tried to figure out what the regional specialty of fat-bottomed ants (hormiga culona) added to the dish. Maybe a little earthiness to the sauce. Anyway, the meat was tender and perfect and we loved the setting, the courtyard at Resaurant Las Cruces. Dessert was grilled pineapple, a dish we'll try to replicate at home this summer.

Soup with Potatoes, Yucca and Plantains..and Rice on the Side

To write about Colombian food without stressing the starch would be like writing about French food and omitting all references to butter. At a friendly colorful restaurant in Zipaquirá, shown here, I ordered a traditional soup called sancocho. Stewing in a very tasty broth were chunks of potatoes, and yucca, and plantains. And, the dish came with a side serving of rice.



Another starchy staple of Colombian cooking is the side dish of smashed fried plantains, known as patacones. We had patacones with several meals during our time on the Caribbean coast, but the best ones were at a tiny place in the bus station in Santa Marta. We were grabbing what we hoped was a quick dinner there ahead of taking an overnight bus. Instead, it took much longer than we expected because the cook made fresh patacones to accompany our grilled chicken. They were worth the wait. The patacones had just the right mix of salt, grease and starch. It's not something you'd have every day, but it was really a treat

Black-and-White Cows, Green Fields and a Salt Cathedral: Sáchica to Zipquirá, Colombia. November 2009.

The journey sometimes is better than the destination. My husband and I set out on a Sunday morning from the tourist spot of Villa de Leyva for one of Colombia's big attractions, the salt cathedral at Zipaquirá. Luckily for us, we missed the direct bus connection between the two cities.

Instead, we got a taxi from Villa de Leyva to a spot on the highway and then flagged down the local blue Reina bus. We enjoyed the nice slow Sunday ride through Colombian countryside, including green pastures dotted with black-and-white cows. (I had to borrow this image from the tourism Web site for Ubate, the dairyland (lechera) of Colombia. None of my shots from the bus window worked out.)

The Reina bus brought us into a different Colombia than we had seen the day before in Villa de Leyva, a upscale weekend getaway spot for wealthier Colombians. One of the delights of Colombia had been hearing local music all the way from Cartagena on the northern coast to Villa de Leyva, not far from Bogotá. These songs are heavy on the accordion, and full of references to Colombian places.. Cartagena, Medellin, Santa Marta, Barranquilla. In Villa de Leyva, we heard "Guantanamera" and other Cuban music, including a cut from the recording that made the Buena Vista Social Club famous. We even heard Bob Marley. Excellent music, but nothing different from what we might hear at a weekend getaway town in any bourgeois place anywhere on this planet. Colombia's bouncy music, such as vallenato songs, is its own thing in a world that can be a little too "global" at times.

The blue Reina bus stopped frequently, letting people on and off. David and I were touched when an older couple got on together. Older people sometimes dress a little more formally in Colombia, as did this couple. The man wore a suit with a hat. The woman too wore a kind of a fedora with a nice black sweater and skirt. Perhaps they were running an errand after Mass. The man held a container, not unlike the one carried by this man in the picture to the left. He also is wearing a nice hat while biking. The older couple were on the bus only a short time. Then another older man got on, wearing a suit with a turtleneck sweater and carrying a leather satchel.

At the end of our journey, the lovely main square of Zipaquirá turned out to be more to our liking than its big attraction, a cathedral made in a salt mine, shown in the last shot.

Police and Tourists in the Street (Oh Yeah): Villa de Leyva, Colombia. November 2009.

It's hard to tell from this photo, but the guy in the green shirt and cowboy hat is holding a puppy. He's having a long chatty talk on a Sunday morning with the two young helmeted policemen on the minibike. I saw this friendly encounter in downtown Villa de Leyva. This quaint colonial city is a weekend retreat for Colombians with enough money for things like weekend retreats.

This is a pretty good "snapshot" of what my husband and I saw of the Colombian police and military during an 11-day trip through some of the touristy highlights of the country. When David and I had told people at home about plans to visit Colombia, we heard worried comments about kidnapping and crime. Yet, we found that Colombia felt like one of the safest and friendliest places that we've visited.

The country has beefed up its security forces in recent years, a reaction to some of the most recent chapters in its terribly sad history. The cocaine-tied violence of the 1990s capped off a 20th century in which Colombia suffered from many years of internal wars. (An estimated 200,000 people died during an earlier period known as La Violencia, which occurred in the 1940s and early 1950s.)

Colombia's defense spending more than tripled to U.S. $9.8 billion in 2008 from U.S. $2.6 billion in 2001, according to the U.S. State Department. The security forces now number about 390,000 uniformed personnel: 260,000 military and 130,000 police. President Alvaro Uribe has raised taxes on wealthier citizens to pay for this expansion, and the United States has kicked in equipment and training through the Plan Colombia.

There seems to be little dispute that Colombia now is much safer than it was a decade ago. The Washington Post's former Bogotá bureau chief wrote in an op-ed this year that during his 2000-2004 tenure in Colombia, "only the capital was spared the horrors of a war marked by massacres with machetes, machine guns and even stones..." He said returned recently to find land "values in Bogotá.. skyrocketing, because the guerrillas were no longer there. Kidnapping was nearly non-existent."

A draft gives Colombia the manpower needed to post so many soldiers and police officers around. There's a Colombian flavor to this heavy security presence, at least in the tourist areas we visited. The warmth and good manners of everyday Colombians are rivaled in only few places that I've visited-- the midwestern U.S., Egypt and Ireland, and these were on display even in the kids we saw serving in the police and military. We first noticed this in the airport in Bogotá during our first hours in Colombia, waiting for a flight to Cartagena. A solider had what appeared to be a police dog with him. We weren't quite sure because the soldier had taken off the leash off the dog, a yellow Lab, who was sprawled on his back to let children pet his belly. In the town of San Gil, a solider went out his way to greet us and to help us find our bus to Barichara.

Given that we stuck to the tourist route, we saw the police and soldiers with some of the cushiest jobs. There were skinny kids in the tourist police uniforms pushing the wheelchairs of heavy senior citizens (abuelitos) on a tour of a famous salt cathedral in Zipaquirá. A soldier was on duty at the gorgeous beach at Parque Nacional Tayrona.

We got to talk a bit with one recruit in Bogotá. He was doing his service with the National Police by giving tours in English at the Police Museum. (He said he had learned his English on his own, largely by listening to the San Diego-based band Switchfoot.) The museum relegated to the basement its display about narcotraffickers and how many of them were caught. That's where we saw this model of the slain drug villain Pablo Escobar. Most of the museum is about the National Police, including an exhaustive display of medals and ribbons.
I tried to ask our guide about how soldiers and members of the national police get their postings. He preferred to stick with the scripted material, but did allow once that some people were "mad" about being sent out to the jungle.

There's interesting debate going on now about Colombia's draft, as seen by this article, The money and the dead: end Colombia's draft, and the comments it drew. The author said:

(T)he libertarian within me thinks that the draft is an unacceptable form of state interference in the life of the individual, and completely incompatible with the values of a free society. I dare anyone who favors conscription to prove that it is not essentially akin to forced labor. And although I also believe that there is such thing as patriotic duty, and that those soldiers who die protecting our liberties and our democracy are heroes, I do not think that conscription goes in the interests of the Colombian state and its citizenry. In other words, the draft à la colombienne makes for bad policy.

One of the commenters addressed a question I'd had-- does everyone really serve?
"I happen to know many young people struggle to find ways to stay in school so they don't have to serve, becuase (sic) they know it is the front lines for them not some cushy job as the Metro Police in Medellin that some are able to buy their way on to."
Another commenter said that these kinds of draft dodgers "are not people you want fighting (the insurgent Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia )FARC. If you had ever been in a war you would know. Remember…it’s only a year, 365 days, 2,087 hours, 12 months. And still they run from serving their country and helping protect the Colombian way of life."

Colombia has been promoting tourism with the slogan - "the only risk is wanting to stay."Hokey as it is, that describes how I feel now about Colombia. We never felt threatened, and Colombia fascinated me. I'd leap at the chance to spend a year there.

I'll be watching and reading in the years ahead with great interest to see how Colombia sorts out what kind of nation it wants to be. I hope that Colombia soon balances the urgent need for public safety, with the equally important one to defend the rights of all citizens. Its increased security has come at a high price for many, and that includes people not connected to the violence, such as slain labor leaders.

More on the security forces in Colombia:
Global Voices Online with clip of pop star Juanes serenading the police.
Livingstone article in Guardian
David G. Young's take on this topic
Human Rights Watch 2009 World Report

The Hike Not Taken: Barichara, Colombia. November 2009

Once I saw the landscape around Barichara, I wished we had time to do the hike that descends to the nearby village of Guane. The streets of Barichara slope upward, with a beautiful little park with palms and cactus at the top of the town. From this park, you can look into a tranquil green valley below. Around sunset, the mountains in the distance look like blue waves flash frozen in place.

We would have had to spend another night in Barichara if we did the hike, and that would have been okay with me. Barichara was one of my favorite places in Colombia.












Founded in the 1741, Barichara is all terra cotta roof tiles and whitewashed walls. Its quaintness is not accidental. There are rules in place, but the effect is lovely. There's not much to do, but walk the hilly streets and perhaps take a dip at la Piscina, a little natural pool near a camping ground.














We spent a Friday night in Barichara, seeing some SUVs with Bogotá plates arrive. Barichara apparently draws a lot of weekend visitors from the capital and from Bucaramanga, a large Colombian city north of Bogotá. Barichara is supposed to have great restaurants. Many of the noted ones were closed during our short visit, but we had a wonderful meal at Restaurant Las Cruces. (More about what we had at Las Cruces in this posting.) We persuaded our waitress to let us stay out on the patio where we'd sat first for a drink, instead of moving to a more formal little patio. On the patio, we were able to let a friendly Barichara resident join us. This little black-and-white dog followed us through the city and hung out during our meal. He looked like a house dog out for a lark. He didn't beg for food, but seemed to only want a little company.

Thanksgiving at a Glorious Beach : Parque Nacional Tayrona, Colombia. November 2009.

My husband David and I had a lot to be grateful for when we woke up on the top floor of the building shown here. It's kind of a supersized wooden hut. Backpackers can rent hammocks on the first floor, while there are two private rooms, or cabanas up top. David and I got one of the cabanas and had this view from our room






Parque Nacional Tayrona on Colombia's Caribbean coast has some of the most beautiful beaches I've ever seen. Gorgeous warm water, good waves, granite boulders to mess with the normal sense of perspective.


























We stayed in the Cabo San Juan de Guía section of the park. To get there, we took a little shuttle into the park and then walked a muddy path in the jungly hills near the sea for about 45 minutes, and then spent another 30 minutes or so walking along beautiful beaches that (sadly) have currents too dangerous for swimming.
At Cabo San Juan de Guía, there's a little restaurant serving good fish and chicken meals, and a little shop selling soda and sundries. That's it for any kind of commercial development. Tayrona's a place to just chill. The only attraction beyond the beach was a friendly puppy, who will someday soon be a pretty big dog. He hung out with David and me on the beach for a while, chewing on palm fronds and a coconut. We had to divert him when he went for my sarong, Keene boat shoes and guide book. (We laughed that this was certainly not the first "Lonely Planet Colombia" he'd used in his teething.)

Snowman in a Straw Sun Hat

There are two places where people stay overnight before going to Tayrona, the resort town of Santa Marta or backpacker haven of Taganga. Taganga sounded much prettier and since it's firmly on the backpacker route, it would be easy to get transport directly to the park.

We opted to stay in Santa Marta and see a bit more of how Colombians vacation, how they live.
We took local buses to and from Parque Nacional Tayrona. On the ride into the park, the bus driver had stacked all kinds of groceries and supplies near him, including a bale of barbed wire. On a rural road, the bus driver's assistant jumped out and left off the bale of wire. The driver honked a few times to let the intended recipient know that his wire has arrived, and drove off.
The beach in Santa Marta was decked out for Christmas. We particularly liked this snowman, who sported the kind of brown-and-black straw hat seen often on Colombian's Caribbean coast. A snowman needing a little shade for his carrot nose is really no more absurd than flying reindeer.
Travel tips:
-Avoid La Costena bus line for traveling from Cartagena to Santa Marta unless you're craving the authenticityof a local bus on a crowded stretch of coast. We were told that the bus would only stop once between Cartagena and Santa Marta, and that this would be in Barranquilla. Instead, the bus stopped along the road all the way to Barranquilla to pick up and let off passengers. Yet, in Barranquilla, the only `stop' was then our minibus, or buseta, pulled into the median of a busy road where another La Costena bus had halted with the engine running.
David and I were told to hop out here and our bags were transferred to other minibus. It made a laugh a little, like a bad corruption on a line from a song from Barranquilla's most famous native, Shakira. "Mira, en Barranquilla, se cambie buseta asi."