Greetings from Bogotá! We are officially underway on our trip, and the Colombian capital is our first stop. These first few days have been a bit of a whirlwind, from a somewhat tearful goodbye with our parents at the airport to getting used to living out of a backpack indefinitely. But overall, we’ve really enjoyed Bogotá!

My first impression of the city is that it’s huge and sprawling. Because we’re here only two days, our adventures were fairly limited to neighboring barrios of La Macarena (where our AirBnB was located) and La Candelaria (area with the top tourist attractions).

On our first day, we started by exploring La Macarena and found a cute coffee shop where we had an “Andean breakfast” with arepas, ham, and veggies.

After breakfast, we took a taxi to the Monserrate for a cable car ride up the mountains. For both of us, this was our favorite part of Bogotá. The views in all directions—both overlooking the entire city and facing the mountains behind—were incredible. We also had fun exploring the paths around the top and took a quick break at the chapel.

As we were leaving the Monserrate (from the bottom of the cable car again), we had a bit of a taxi crisis. Our AirBnB host recommended that we not walk back from the Monserrate, even though it’s not that far and it was daytime, because there are mugging risks. We were also told to not hail taxi cabs off the street, because they may be rogue and rob you blind. So, we were in a bit of pickle—there were some yellow cabs lined up on the street but we didn’t want to take them because we were too nervous. Eventually, we realized there was an authorized transportation service at the Monserrate center that hooked us up with a safe taxi.

The taxi took us to La Candelaria district, the historic city center. We wandered around here and visited the Botero Museum, which was quite amusing. My favorite painting was his interpretation of the Mona Lisa.

On our second day, after going to the bus station to buy our tickets to Manizales (our next destination in La Zona Cafatera, AKA Coffee Country), we visited the Gold Museum—chockfull of, you guessed it, gold.

We meandered back to the apartment after the museum, which was a fun way to explore this lively city more. And now, time for coffee!

Travel Notes:

• Uber was a good option for getting around. It is safe and reasonably priced—in our limited experience, similar to the costs of the yellow taxis. (We didn’t figure this out until after our Monserrate experience.)
• The yellow taxis were also fine, but as we learned from other travelers to Bogota, you should take care to only use official yellow taxis. We used the app “Tappsi” to call some taxis, which is good because they know they are being tracked by the app. Otherwise, we heard horror stories of people getting into rogue taxis and being robbed blind.
• Walking around, even short distances, is not recommended at night. But once you figure out how to use the Ubers or taxis correctly, they aren’t that expensive at all. Going around La Candelaria and La Macarena neighborhoods never cost us more than $3.
• If you don’t like birds, steer clear of Plaza Bolivar in La Candelaria. (And we don’t necessarily mind birds, but we were both unimpressed by the location anyway.)