Biking Tour of Bogota

We got up about 8:00, slept amazing!!

We had breakfast at the hostel. It was ok, not great, but it is included in the price of the room.

We started walking arounnd, dad is looking for a Claro place so he can get a SIM card for his phone/hotspot. No luck, and mostly everything is closed, as it's Sunday.

We decided to do a Bogota bike tour, so headed to where the office is, and timed it perfect. They were just getting ready to start the tour, so we joined them. A big group, probably 20-25 people.

We got a lot of history about Bogota and saw lots of different places, including park,s the bullfighting arena, the red light district, fruit markets, the central cemetery and learned about Columbia's national sport, tejo.

On Sunday's, the city closes down many of the downtown roads to vehicles and makes them bike and pedestrian friendly, which was perfect for our bike tour.

Near the start, a mass crowd was walking down the street, chanting and holding up banners. It was a huge protest against bull-fighting (and animal cruelty in general), people dressed in animal costumes, and one woman was even almost completely naked. She had only panties on. Weird. I'd put it at 5,000-10,000 people. After watching for a bit, we bypassed it and continued on the tour.

It's always interesting to hear about the history of the city on tours like this, including the very violent 1980's ad 90's, the sordid history with rebels and assassinations.

We learned about the wild, feral hippopotamus population thriving in Columbia. I guess the drug lord, Pablo Escobar, in the 80's had wild hippo's brought over from Africa. During his downfall, they escaped and took up residence in a river and now they have the second highest hippo population in the world. They don't know what to do about them, the animal rights groups get upset when they hear about killing them, but they are not native and are destroying everything.

We stopped at a bar where they did Columbia's national sport, tejo, which involves throwing heavy iron balls into a clay pit with explosive packets buried. You get points to making one of these gunpowder packets goes off. It was pretty fun!

The bicycle tour lasted over 4 hours, and we got back to the hostel around 3:00, stopping for a piece of pizza on the way.

We used the internet and lounged for a bit and argued about where to go for supper. We then headed to the trendy university area, around plazeto del Chorro de Quevedo for supper at a restaurant called Rosalita's.

It was an absolutely beautiful day, sunnny and hot. We all got sunburns.