Bogotá, Colombia

From Colombo in Sri Lanka to Bogotá in Colombia - we literally flew to the other side of the world! And it only took us around 37 hours on three different planes and 2 hours at the Bogota Airport Immigration until we finally arrived ar our hostel. 🤷🏻‍♀️
Bogotá is the capital of Colombia, lies at an altitude of 2300 m and has a temperature of 10 to 20 degrees, much to Alinas discomfort (altitude sickness and coldness ahoi). We only visited the touristic areas of Bogotá, which are la Candelaria with its famous colourful buildings and cobblestone streets (yes, we have a thing for cobblestones) and Chapinero, the hip and more modern area with its characteristic brick buildings, imitating typical english architecture. We even joined a guided Walking Tours (Gilles’ first guided tour, yey!) through la Candelaria, which was a really interesting and fun way to explore the area and get some historic infos along the way! We stayed in Chapinero (because we heard that’s the safest part of Bogotá 😇), but la Candelaria, being the older part of the city, felt more Colombian to us and will definitely be our base when we come back to Bogotá. Still, both areas had their charm, a lot of tourist infrastructure and lovely places to eat and drink. We made sure to try the local alcoholic beverage called “chicha”, which is a very sour (and rather strong) drink made of fermented corn, the infamous coca leaf tea (supposed to be good for altitude sickness) and a typical Bandeja Paisa (farmers plate), which is basically an assortment of fried colombian main ingredients: different pieces of meat, chorizo, blood sausage, potatoes, bananas and french fries - it is 🤤🤤🤤!! And boy, the whole city bursts with colours, graffittis, murals etc 😍 a dream for every photographer and a nightmare for creating a footprint with a limit of 20 pictures 😂
Overall, we’re glad to say that we never really felt unsafe in Bogotá, which made it a really good start to our trip in South America! The language was and is still a challenge of course (most of the Colombians really and stubbornly refuse to speak english 😂), but talking with hands and feet and un poco de espanol brought us a long way 😄
Now out of the cold and into the heat of our very first desert! 😍Read more