Day 75: Full Circle

Day 75
Today I'm in: Romulus, Michigan

It's 75 days later, and I'm back where this whole adventure started, at the Hilton Garden Inn in Romulus, Michigan.  Only two doors down from the room I stayed in on May 5 - even the boring view of the parking lot is the same.  In about twenty minutes I'll take a cab to Ann Arbor, pick up my car, and make the drive to Chicago.  By tonight I'll be in my new apartment, the movers will come on either Monday or Tuesday with my things, and in just a few weeks I'll be a contributing member of society again.  

People keep asking me what the highlight of the trip was.  I don't think, on a trip this long and this varied, that I could narrow it down to one.  Paragliding in Chile.  Driving into a herd of elephants in South Africa.  Hiking through rice paddies on Bali.  Climbing waterfalls in Laos.  There are too many highlights to choose from.

There were low points, too.  The last week or two have been colored by a little bit of homesickness.  As the trip drew to a close I found myself noticing less, taking fewer chances, not doing enough to stretch myself.  I don't think I was entirely fair to Colombia - as the last country on the trip, it was probably inevitable that I'd be a little bit burned out by the time I got there.  I'm very happy to be home.

So let's take a look at the trip by the numbers:

- I visited 15 countries total.  Some, like South Africa and Brazil, I feel I got to know very well.  Others, like Laos and Indonesia, I just scratched the surface.  There's a lot I didn't see.
- I stayed in 43 different accommodations, from five-star hotels in Jakarta to tents in South Africa to guesthouses in Brazil.  Almost all were wonderful, and the ones that weren't at least helped build character.  I hope.
- I took 47 flights, on 21 different airlines, and passed through 42 different airports.  The biggest miracle in all of this is that I didn't have a single delayed flight or a single lost bag.  This was probably my biggest worry as I planned the trip - at times my pace was so quick that a misplaced bag or canceled flight could have really made life difficult.  It's almost miraculous that everything went as smoothly as it did.

At the risk of turning this into an award-acceptance speech, big thanks go out to my parents, for not only instilling a love of travel but also helping to make some of the trip possible.  I'm also grateful for the friends who joined me along the way (or TRIED to join, even if they didn't make it), who kept up with me online, and who passed along tips and knowledge about the places I was going.  Thanks for helping to make this such a great experience.

So with that, I'll close the blog.  It's time to move on to the next big thing.  

Day 74: The Final Day

Day 74
Today I'm in: Bogota, Colombia

I'll admit Taganga wasn't my favorite stop on the trip.  It was hot, dusty and more than a little bit run-down, and although I was enjoying lying in a hammock and reading by the pool, for the last few days I've definitely been feeling the itch to get back home.  To do so I had to fly back to Bogota and spend a final night there before catching my onward flight to Miami and finally Detroit.

Fortunately, my friends Camila and Heinrich proved to be wonderful hosts in Bogota and made my final day in Colombia a great one.  I took a cab to their apartment, and we almost immediately hopped in the car for the half-hour trip up to Chia, a town north of the city.  Along the way we picked up Camila's mother, who lives nearby, and who doesn't speak much English.  That meant we'd all be speaking Spanish for the next few hours, which kept me on my toes as I worked to come up with the right words and keep pace with the conversation.  Everyone was really good about speaking slowly for me, and I think I held my own pretty well.  My vocabulary is pretty good, but I don't speak the language often enough to truly be fluent.  It was a fun little challenge on my last day.

Chia is a fast-growing bedroom community for Bogota, but it seems to be best known for Andres Carne de Res, a massive restaurant, bar and entertainment complex.  It started several decades ago as a simple roadside stand serving barbecued meat, and over the years it's morphed into a huge enterprise spanning several city blocks, with an enormous parking lot to match.  Inside there are multiple dining rooms, dance floors, bars, and even an area for hammocks where people too drunk to get home can spend the night.  The owner's wife has decorated the whole place with crafts and memorabilia and everything is decked out in lights.

In addition to being a Friday, today was also Colombia's independence day so the mood was especially festive.  We were all starving, so I let Camila and Heinrich order a whole slew of Colombian specialties - arepa con choclo (a sort of corn pancake with cheese inside), refajo (beer mixed with soda water that's surprisingly refreshing), some of the best roasted corn I've ever had, fried yucca fingers, and plenty more.  The main course was an enormous parrilla of grilled beef and chicken, prepared salted and served on a sizzling platter.  Dessert came four ways - arroz con leche, lemon mousse, rich chocolate cake and a fried cheese dish topped with guava jam.  Toward the end of the evening the music was turned up and couples started salsa dancing at the tables around us.

Alas, I had a very early wakeup the next morning, so we couldn't stay too late and paint the town, as tempting as it was.  But I owe Camila and Heinrich a great deal of thanks for their hospitality and willingness to show me around, and I was happy to finish up the trip with good friends and good food.  I'm currently sitting in the lounge at the Bogota airport, waiting on my flight to Miami.  In just a few short hours I'll be touching down on US soil for the first time since May 6, and tonight I'll be going to sleep in good old Michigan once again.  Expect a recap soon! 

Day 73: One Last Walk in the Woods

Day 73
Today I'm in: Taganga, Colombia

A word of advice: if you find yourself in north-central Colombia and consider a trip to Tayrona National Park, do not go by boat.

It started out innocuously enough.  The boat was pretty small and had a full complement of passengers, so I wound up in the middle of a bench seat with nothing to hold onto.  The water in Taganga's bay was smooth as glass, though, and even at speed it was smooth and pleasant.  Then we rounded the headland at the mouth of the bay and hit the open Caribbean Sea.

That's when the boat ride turned into probably the most miserable experience I've had on this trip.  A small boat traveling at high speed across large ocean swells literally smacks and up and down over and over again.  At first it was a little fun and some of the passengers up in the bow were squealing.  But we had to cover seven miles, and within about five minutes the fun was gone and everyone was holding on to whatever they could to avoid getting thrown out of the boat.  For me that meant trying to maintain a grip on my increasingly slippery bench seat.  At times it felt like entire waves were hitting us.  By the time we pulled into the dock at Cabo San Juan inside Tayrona, we were soaked to the skin and two of the passengers had thrown up.

Fortunately, Tayrona turned out to be pretty nice.  I don't know if I can say it was worth the boat ride (I'm not sure anywhere is worth that) but it was awfully spectacular.  The park sprawls along several miles of jungly coastline to the east of Santa Marta and includes some of Colombia's finest beaches.  Unlike the gray, polluted beaches in Cartagena and Taganga, these have golden sand and the clean, clear water that's more representative of the Caribbean.

I did about a two-mile hike through Tayrona's western stretches, where the jungle is thickest and beaches are most accessible.  From Cabo San Juan I walked to the aptly named La Piscina ("the pool") where an offshore reef keeps the surf to a minimum; most of Tayrona's other beaches are classified as unsafe for swimming.  From there I hiked to Arrecifes - a long, lonely strip of sand with pounding surf and almost no shade - and on to Canaveral, the final beach.  None of the beaches were particularly crowded (Tayrona's not easy to get to) and the weather was really cooperative as well.  

After the trauma of the boat ride, I elected to make the trip back to Taganga by bus, even though it meant I'd be dropped off in Santa Marta and have to make the final leg of the journey in a cab.  About 20 minutes out of Tayrona, we were pulled over at one of Colombia's ubiquitous police checkpoints.  Everyone was ordered off the bus and about ten police officers spent a half hour literally taking the inside of the bus apart.  Everything - seats, flooring, paneling, even the instrument panel in front of the driver - was unscrewed or pulled off in the search for illegal drugs.  I was nervous we'd all be asked to show ID (I'd left the photocopy of my passport back in Taganga and only had my drivers' license) but nothing was found and we were allowed to continue on our way.

Tomorrow afternoon I leave Taganga and fly back to Bogota, where I'll spend the final night of the trip.  I'm looking forward to coming home; I feel like I haven't been truly fair to Colombia because my readiness to be in one place again has clouded my judgment a bit.  But I'll save all my weepy reflections for a special post when I get back to the States, don't worry.

Day 72: Exploring Taganga (or: How I Spent 25 Minutes of Day 72)

Day 72
Today I'm in: Taganga, Colombia

Taganga is not a large place.  It's comprised of roughly ten streets running east-west and about five streets running north-south.  The only paved streets are the ones within a block or so of the waterfront, and the main road linking Taganga to Santa Marta.  Houses are simple one-level affairs with large tiled patios and interior courtyards.  It's easy to forget there's a large city just over the mountain, except at night when the lights of Santa Marta glow brightly over the hilltops.  Taganga is a very sleepy place, full of children running barefoot down dusty roads, dogs and cats slinking around underfoot, and families sitting on their front porches listening to Colombian music and watching the occasional motorbike go by.  The pace here is molasses slow.

The heat might have something to do with it.  Like it does in Cartagena, the heat settles like a blanket on the town, morning, noon and night.  With only one exception - the somewhat pricey but not-that-nice-looking Hotel Ballena Azul on the waterfront - none of the accommodations in Taganga have air conditioning.  I'm staying at Divanga, a guest house a few blocks inland that consists of ten rooms arranged around a small pool and thatched-roof patio that catch a nice breeze.  It's a great place - the French owner Lucie is a real gem and a great source of inside information - but inside my room it's just as hot as it is outside.  I don't even mind that there's no hot water, since the cold showers feel so good.  There's a ceiling fan, which helps a little, but I still have a lot of trouble getting to sleep.  Any time I pass the town's one ATM, inside a little glass booth on the main north-south street, I stop in for a few moments to enjoy the free air conditioning.

Taganga gained fame as a backpacker destination over the last decade, but it's slowly moving upmarket, with more and more private villas popping up on the hills above town and new guesthouses and hostels being carved out of existing homes all the time.  The residents still rule the streets, but there are plenty of European tourists as well.  Almost no Americans - I listen to voices as I'm walking around and have only heard one other American accent in three days.

The waterfront is the town's de-facto center, although during the day even it is a little slow.  It comes alive at night, however - families out for a stroll, tourists in the bars, teenagers setting off fireworks on the beach.  There is a narrow beach, but it's somewhat dirty and clogged with fishing boats, so it's better just to look out to sea from one of the beachfront bars than go for a swim.  There's a path that leads up one of the headlands north of town that brings you to two smaller, cleaner beaches; I had a swim at one of them today.

Overall, Taganga is short on sights but long on places where you can put your feet up and do nothing.  Doing nothing is the order of the day here, all day, every day.  After eleven weeks of frenetic sightseeing that's taken some adjusting, but I did get all the way through a book on my phone's Kindle app today while lying in a hammock, so I think I'm getting the hang of it.  The big natural draw is nearby Tayrona National Park, which I visited today - more on that in the next entry.  

Day 71: Transfer Fun

Day 71
Today I'm in: Taganga, Colombia

I am never going to get caught up posting entries here.  Fortunately, Day 71 wasn't one of the most memorable days of the trip, although it wasn't without the uncertainty, excitement and general lack of clarity that come with attempting to move around in a foreign country.

On a map, going from Cartagena to Taganga doesn't appear to be too complicated.  It's a distance of only about 100 miles or so, and there's a highway connecting the two places.  I had originally planned to take a long-distance bus (after all, the one I took in Chile had been very comfortable), but when I asked the staff at our hotel in Cartagena, they said they could arrange a van transfer for me.  It would take around three hours and cost only about $40 USD.  Not bad at all.

The shuttle came right on time and was about the size of a SuperShuttle in the US.  It was about half full (including a mother with a fussy baby) and we spent the next half-hour driving through lunatic Cartagena traffic picking up the rest of the complement of passengers  It was very tight seating on the bus, but at least some of the passengers were getting off in Barranquilla, a large city about halfway along the route.  The first half of the drive - which took us past the Volcan de Totumo that we'd visited a few days before - was through a lush landscape of hills and pastures, usually with the Caribbean visible just a half-mile or so in the distance.  The driver drove like a maniac, overtaking in both the passing lane and on the hard shoulder and swerving wildly when oncoming traffic came on too suddenly.

We got to Barranquilla a little after 2:30pm.  Barranquilla is Colombia's fourth largest city (after Bogota, Medellin and Cali) and is one of its busiest ports.  It's a sprawling, fairly charmless city, although it looked to be a bustling and reasonably prosperous place, and it's the hometown of both Shakira and Sofia Vergara, two of the country's better-known and better-looking exports.  We rolled around town for almost an hour dropping off passengers and finally, around 3:30, the driver pulled up to the shuttle company's office and announced that I needed to wait there for a connecting shuttle.  OK.  I sat in the lobby of the office for half an hour and then another shuttle pulled up, and we began the slow refilling process again, driving from house to house in Barranquilla picking people up.

It was 4:30 before we hit the road for Santa Marta, the next destination about another hour up the coast.  The drive between Barranquilla and Santa Marta wasn't quite as picturesque - a flat, scrubby, cactus-studded landscape, with the Caribbean just off to the left breaking onto empty gray beaches.  We rolled through a few towns where it was apparent that poverty is still a fairly large problem in Colombia.  The conditions there rivaled some of the worst townships I saw in South Africa - run-down homes made from scrap wood and corrugated steel, dogs in the streets, and dust and garbage everywhere.  It was sort of disappointing after how nice Cartagena had been.  There appeared to be some sort of festival going on in many of the towns - we passed multiple processions of people carrying religious statues, lively-looking street parties with blasting speakers, and kids in colorful school uniforms performing on makeshift stages.  I have no idea what the occasion was but I'm hoping to get some clues while I'm here.

Finally, a little after 5:30, we rolled into Santa Marta, another port city that's much smaller than Barranquilla, and began dropping off passengers.  I was transferred yet again into another van for the short 15-minute journey over the mountain to Taganga, where I finally reached my hotel just before 6pm.  Not quite the three hours promised by the hotelier in Cartagena, but it definitely could have been worse.  Night fell pretty shortly after my arrival, so I didn't see much of Taganga until today - I'll cover that in the next entry.  

Day 70: Sun, sun and more sun

Day 70

Today I'm in: Cartagena, Colombia

As I mentioned on Day 68, the beaches immediately surrounding Cartagena and generally not great.  Before coming I'd heard them described as "horrible" and "ugly", terms which seem a bit overblown.  Suffice to say that for a city on the Caribbean, the beaches are disappointing.  Further down the coast, however, is the Islas Rosario National Park, a chain of islands that's far enough out to sea that the beaches aren't clouded by river silt or fouled by pollution from the mainland.  Through our hotel, we were able to set up a daytrip to visit one of the islands, so that's where Day 70 took us. 

We were picked up early in the morning and driven to the city's tourist docks, which are only about a ten-minute walk from our hotel.  Boats were leaving for islands up and down the Rosario archipelago, as well as some of the more picturesque mainland beaches, and the docks were jammed with tourists.  The heat was back in full force - we'd had a slight reprieve the day before, but today was like being inside an oven.  Eventually we were herded onto a speedboat, issued lifejackets, and were on our way. 

On the way out of the harbor - Cartagena has one of the finest natural harbors in South America, an enormous, deep bay several miles wide - we had a nice view of Boca Grande, the city's tony high-rise neighborhood that draws a lot of well-to-do Colombian tourists (the hotels in the old town seemed to cater more to Americans and Europeans).  It stretches for quite a ways down a natural peninsula and reminded me a lot of Recife in Brazil - a wall of skyscrapers.

Once we'd cleared the harbor mouth the captain opened up the throttle and we bounced across the open sea for about 30 minutes until we reached our destination, the "Isla del Encanto" beach camp.  It was allegedly part of a resort, although we only saw one small building that looked like maybe it could contain hotel rooms.  Most of the facilities seemed to be there for day tourists - besides the beach, there was a swimming pool, massage tent, volleyball court and thatched-roof bar.  You could also sign up (at extra cost, of course) for two-hour excursions to an aquarium, snorkeling sites, or jetskiing.  We elected just to remain on the beach, which was fringed with palm trees and was very nice.  The water was bathtub warm, there were plenty of chairs, and waiters periodically (VERY periodically) came around to take drink orders.  It wasn't a bad way to spend a day.  Midway through the day lunch was served, and around three in the afternoon we boarded the boat for the return trip to Cartagena.  All told, Day 70 was pretty sedate; I'd write more, but there's not much to cover; we spent most of the day lounging in the sun, swimming and catching up. 

Evan was leaving that night to catch his flight back to the US, and we got back to the dock in time for dinner before he grabbed a taxi.  Although he was only here for about three days, it was really nice to have some company - now I've only got five days left, which I'll be spending up the coast in the small fishing town of Taganga.  

Day 69: Jamie vs the Volcano

Day 69
Today I'm in: Cartagena, Colombia


After a nice, long night's sleep we woke up and headed back into old Cartagena for lunch and to continue exploring.  Although still sweltering, the skies were a bit bluer today and it was maybe five degrees cooler than it had been the day before (when you're dealing with this level of heat and humidity, that's pretty meaningful!) We found a great place for lunch - a little corner snack shop called Bocaditos Madrid that was recommended by my guidebook, but that had moved locations since the book was published, so we were lucky we found it at all.  It had excellent food (cheap too, which is no small feat in Cartagena, where prices are several levels higher than the rest of the country) - we each got a bowl of caldo de res, with coconut rice, salad, and a side of fried chicken, and we split an order of arepa con huevo (corn fritters with scrambled eggs inside) and fried yucca dumplings with ground beef inside.  

Following lunch we went back to the hotel to don bathing suits and meet the bus that would take us to Volcan de Totumo.  This is Colombia's famous "mud volcano," which has become a de-rigeur stop for tourists in Cartagena.  It's located about 50 kilometers to the northeast of Cartagena, and when we got there we found what looked like a miniature volcano or a very large termite mound.  According to legend, the volcano was formerly the normal kind (with lava) but a local priest, convinced the devil was inside, sprinkled it with holy water every day of his life.  When he died, the lava turned to mud, and the volcano has spewed mud ever since.

Regardless of whether you believe the legend or not, the volcano is pretty cool.  You clamber up a rickety flight of wooden steps to the top, where the caldera (if you can call it that) is full of people.  When it's your turn, you're pretty much pulled in by "helpful" "masseuses", who roll you around while giving you half-hearted massages of dubious quality.  The mud itself is pleasantly cool - not cold, but not warm either - and it's got a bizarre consistency that neither of us could really describe.  It's famed for its therapeutic qualities, which I suppose it has, but the best part was that it didn't have that rotten-egg stink you usually find in mud baths.  You're very buoyant in it; once you're vertical it's difficult to get yourself horizontal, and vice versa.  We couldn't touch bottom either - the mud comes up from some mysterious underground conduit, and we decided it was better not to think about how deep it was or how the volcano actually worked.

When you're finished up, you're helped out and you waddle down another flight of steps to a nearby lake, where more "helpful" personnel rinse you off.  They even take your bathing suit off for you, such that you find yourself naked in mostly-opaque water surrounded by people you don't know.  The mud is thin enough that washes off pretty completely - I was expecting to find bits of it for the rest of the night, but we were clean as whistles when we left the lake.

The bus took us back to Cartagena and we finished up the day with dinner at Crepes & Waffles, a Colombian chain restaurant that, at dinnertime, serves an enormous menu of savory dishes.  We headed to a nearby bar after dinner to finish up the day, although as with the day before, the sun had really sapped a lot of our energy, so we hit the hay around midnight. 

Day 68: Company in Cartagena

Day 68
Today I'm in: Cartagena, Colombia

Day 68 began, as so many others have, with an early wakeup and a morning taxi ride to the Bogota airport.  Once I got checked in there, I went through security and met up with Evan, one of my best friends from Chicago and my traveling companion for the next few days.  We were headed for Cartagena, arguably Colombia's premier tourist destination, up on the Caribbean coast.  A short 90-minute flight later and we had left rainy, frigid Bogota behind and were descending into the muggy, hazy Cartagena area.

I'm back above the Equator again, so it's summer here, but in Cartagena it's basically always summer.  It's hot here - hot and humid.  Within moments of leaving an air-conditioned area you are sweating, and in a few minutes you're really sweating.  Sunglasses and sunblock are essential, and some of the (many) touts you encounter as you walk through town try to sell you hats.  After spending the last week or so in colder climates (Chile and Bogota) it's a little jarring.  But it's nice to be in the tropics again.

And none of it really matters because Cartagena is a very endearing place.  The city was one of the first European settlements in what's now Colombia and occupies a series of islands fronting the Caribbean that over the centuries have been essentially merged into one large peninsula.  The old city takes center stage, and the more modern high-rise Boca Grande area is off to the west, along the city's beaches.  The beaches are Cartagena aren't quite as ugly as I'd been led to believe, but they're not very memorable either - mostly gray sand and pretty minimal surf.  The historic center of town is what draws people here.

Our hotel, the Monterrey, faces the main gate to the old city across a wide plaza.  The hotel is in a restored colonial building and the view from our room (pictured) is pretty great.  On the roof there's a pool and a bar that looks across the various domes and steeples of the old town, and on the side streets leading from the hotel, in the slightly-newer-than-the-old-town Getsemani neighborhood, there are plenty of places to eat and drink.  We headed out to explore almost immediately after we arrived.

Despite the heat, it's pretty easy to get around, although the old town (encircled by a wall) is a bit of a labyrinth and it's also easy to get turned around, especially since the street names change every block.  We were constantly pulling out maps to determine where we were.  Even while quasi-lost, it's a great place to wander - every street has a unique view toward a church, a shady plaza, or the ramparts of the old city wall.  Many of the streets are lined by surprisingly upmarket shops and restaurants - wealthy Colombians come here in droves, and it's an increasingly popular stop for Caribbean cruises and European tourists as well.  It's also fairly compact, so in the space of a few hours we kept happening upon the same corners, the same shops and the same little squares and plazas.

You do get hassled by touts every time you turn a corner - they sell everything, from handbags to hats to snack foods to tours of nearby "historic sights" - but it's hasn't quite morphed into a complete Disney caricature.  Certain corners of the old town, especially the ones that bump up against the "rest" of Cartagena outside the walls, remind you that this is still a fully functioning Colombian city.  There are locutorios selling cell phone minutes, carnicerias selling meat, bodegas selling just about everything, and a weirdly large number of places to make photocopies.

For dinner we headed back to Getsemani and found a steakhouse with just about every cut of meat you can think of (we were hungry and decided that more uniquely Colombian food could wait until the next day.)  We each had steaks the size of baseball gloves for about half what you'd pay for a similarly-sized piece of beef at home.  Cartagena cuisine revolves around seafood - not surprising given its location - but just inland are some of the country's best grazing flatlands, so (fortunately for non-seafood fans like me) beef is a popular option as well.

We retired pretty early; Evan had flown overnight from Chicago to reach Colombia, I'd gotten up at 6am to go to the airport, and multiple hours in the punishing equatorial sun had wiped us both out.  Before heading for bed, though, we arranged a few more activities through our hotel, including a visit to one of Colombia's quirkier tourist attractions, the mud volcano of El Totumo outside of Cartagena.  More on that in tomorrow's entry.  

Day 66 & 67: Vamos Al Norte

Day 66 & 67
Today I'm in: Bogota, Colombia

I'm copping out a little bit on Day 66.  Basically I woke up, went to the Antofagasta airport, flew to Santiago, spent about five hours in the LAN lounge drinking cocktails, watching movies and surfing the web, then got on a plane and spent another six hours flying up to Colombia.  The only real bit of excitement occurred when the passenger sitting next to me dumped his drink (which, from the smell/looks of things, was some kind of amaretto and cream) all over my legs and seat.  Looks like I'll be doing laundry one more time before I head home...

We touched down in Bogota at about 10:30pm.  The streets looked very, very quiet - Bogota is a massive city, one of South America's largest (alongside Sao Paulo, Rio, Buenos Aires, Lima, Santiago and Caracas) but it was deserted and a little sinister looking by the time I got to the hotel.

I woke up the next morning to gray skies and intermittent drizzle.  Bogota sits in a valley between mountain ranges, and even in the summer sees a lot of cloudy weather and cool temperatures (it barely rose above 60 degrees while I was there.)  Umbrella in hand, I headed out to see the La Candelaria district where my hotel was located.  La Calendaria is Bogota's historic center and features a lot of steeply rising streets, brightly painted tile-roofed houses and small inns and shops.  Getting around is pretty easy thanks to Bogota's easy-to-navigate street numbering system (calles run east-west, carreras run north-south and house numbers are based on your distance from each numbered intersection) and La Candelaria is small enough that wandering is pretty straightforward.  I found the Plaza de Bolivar, the city's pigeon-filled main square (with a statue of the eponymous libertador in the center) and spent a few hours strolling the area.

For lunch I stopped into Quinua y Amarato, a small storefront shop with a team of women who work in an open kitchen preparing all sorts of dishes, each of which revolves around quinoa, the Andean grain, in some way.  I had a nice set lunch with a quinoa cake, cilantro cream soup, coconut rice and salad, all for a very agreeable price.  Colombia is a less expensive place than Chile or Brazil, although Bogota is the largest and therefore priciest city.

Outside of La Calendaria, however, Bogota seems to sprawl for mile after mile of brown-and-gray sameness.  Maybe it was the soggy skies (after lunch the rain picked up and it came down pretty hard for the rest of the afternoon) or a little bit of travel fatigue setting in, but I had a tough time warming up to the city.  Unlike the night before, there were plenty of people around - throngs of them on the streets - but despite the backdrop of misty green mountains, the city leaves a little bit to be desired, aesthetically speaking.  Things have improved a lot over the past few years, however - the TransMilenio bus rapid transit system has taken a lot of cars off the streets, the entire city center is closed to traffic on certain Sundays, and bike lanes and wider sidewalks have proliferated, making it a more pedestrian-friendly place.

After sunset I jumped in a cab and headed up to the Zona Rosa, a fashionable area north of downtown that's full of restaurants, shops and bars and is home to some of the city's swankiest apartment buildings.  At Casa, a very laid-back bar on a side street, I met up with Camila and Heinrich, two friends from Michigan who are originally from Colombia and who have moved back now that we've all graduated.  It was great to catch up with them and get some tips on things to see, foods to try and general ways to make getting around the country easier.  I'll see them again when I pass through Bogota in a week or so, and hopefully will get to see a bit more of the city with their help.

Today I'm in Cartagena, on the Caribbean coast, where my friend Evan has joined me - but that will have to wait for tomorrow.  For now, it's been a long (and very hot) day  - Cartagena isn't quite as cool and green and placid as Bogota - and it's time for bed.  

Day 65: Cut and Paste

Day 65
Today I'm in: Antofagasta, Chile

When I was planning the trip, I booked myself into Antofagasta with the intention of getting out into the Atacama Desert to see some of the more interesting sights there.  After I bought tickets, I did a bit more digging and realized that most of the things I wanted to see weren't really doable in a day trip, unless I woke up at 5am and got back at midnight.  So I found myself with the same problem I had in Arica - a full day booked in a place that, if you don't know anyone there, doesn't really have a full day's worth of things to do. I'll be the first to admit I didn't do the best job planning the northern Chile portion of the trip.

I took my time getting moving this morning and spent a lot of time just sort of vegging around in the hotel room.  When I did hit the street, I visited a Hertz branch a few blocks away to see what a rental car would cost - I figured I could at least drive a little ways into the desert and check things out - but they wanted almost $100 USD for a same-day return.  As I come up on the end of the trip, money is getting a little tighter, so that was out - Antofagasta it was.

I feel like I could just drop in my descriptions of Arica and Iquique here - Antofagasta is a nice enough city, spread along the Pacific coast with plenty of high-rise condos, sprawling suburbs and a compact, slightly scruffy city center with pedestrian malls and mobs of shoppers.  It's larger than my previous two stops (I misspoke yesterday; this is actually Chile's second-largest city, not its third) but aside from the ocean and the starkness of the desert behind it, it's not a very noteworthy place.  It's mostly just a large port and a base for mining operations going on in the Atacama.

At the recommendation of my guidebook, I did have an amazing (and cheap!) lunch at Don Pollo, a roast-chicken place in the center of town.  I'm a fan of all chicken dishes, but this was particularly good - really juicy and succulent and seasoned damn near perfection.  It's not an especially Chilean dish, but the place was thronged with people, so at the very least, it's a dish that Chilean people like, which is good enough for me.

More excitingly, shortly after I got back to the room around 4:30pm, Antofagasta was shaken by a mild earthquake.  I've been in three earthquakes before - one in Los Angeles while I was visiting my friend Brandon in 2002 (neither of us felt it, although later in the day other people were talking about it) and two in Chicago that both struck at night while I was asleep.  This is the first one I've been fully aware of while it was happening, although at first I thought it was just vibrations from the construction site behind the hotel.  It only lasted about 15 seconds, and it took me a few seconds to register what was happening.  Like I said, it was very mild - the power stayed on, the hotel made no announcements, nobody in the street below seemed to be bothered.  The worst that happened was that hundreds of car alarms all over the city went off.  But it was still an event for me.

It's really hard to believe, in a non-related item, that it's already Day 65.  One part of me feels like I just left home, while another part is starting to be ready to get back and be a bit more stationary for awhile.  With only ten days left in the trip, I'm starting to spend some of my evening downtime doing things like scheduling a Comcast installation in my new place and emailing my movers to figure out an exact delivery date for my things.  It's the beginning of the end of the trip; tomorrow I'm off to Colombia for the last leg of the journey, where it will be good to put my jacket away and get tropical again.