Tejo time

26 de Julio

The guidebook repeatedly led tourists to their deaths with incorrect directions

Bogota is a fun place. It’s a city of 8 million, but on Sundays there doesn’t seem to be anyone around. The locals have a brilliant custom, where cars are banned from the city centre streets on Sundays, and these streets are taken over by cyclists, and even better, not the lycra wearing ones who laugh incessantly at cafes at 7am. We took advantage of this last Sunday and took part in a guided tour by bicycle around the city.

Starting in the old town of La Candelaria, we travelled through cobbled streets, extremely difficult on old school mountain bikes with barely any suspension. Memories of the Anus Bus pictures start to come back to us now.

Bogota is heavily graffitied, and although it has its fair share of mindless scrawls similar to that from illiterates who decorate trains, there is also some amazing artwork, sometimes leftist, sometimes from artists who simply have an amazing talent to share. It’s a highlight of the city to meander around and examine the maestros ‘ works.

Cliff diving Jesus would find out he was too big for the pool

Jesus will be mad when he discovers Mary didn't cover his cross with glad wrap

The tour also took us through the red light area, where there are many girls who don’t understand that Bogota is a very cold place, and only wear their bras and panties or at the most very short skirts while standing against street lamps. These girls are very polite and nice though, as they were always saying “Hello Mr Handsome “ and were offering to give me a good price, whatever that means. More proof of what wonderful people the Colombians are. Also proof that they are at best, terrible dressers.

To explain best, it seems tradition for the men is to roll up the t-shirt to man boob level and let the guts hang out. There seems to be an unofficial street contest going on at any stage, like brooding pigeons looking for that ample mate. The women also enjoy their 80’s flashbacks, with their vintage stone wash denim, which seems to be painted on in sizes approximately eight times less than required.  And mullets are back too, for both sexes. Its retro all the way in Colombia, especially in Bogota

The shoestring backpackers would have to settle for the lower end products of the red light district

Bogota is cold. It is situated nearly 3000m above sea level surrounded my mountains, and daily temperatures rarely reach twenty degrees. This is no more so evident at the top of the mountain, where you can take a cable car for your own personal frostbite souvenir. Which is still a lot warmer than the bus rides here. From Santa Marta to Bogota, we took a seventeen hour bus trip, where we had heard from other travellers that the drivers like to lower the temps a little, so we should probably pack a coat. The fact that we were picking icicles off the windows, suggested that we should have also packed thermals, down jackets and crampons as well. We were hoping the rest stops would be in Antarctica so we could warm up a little.

Bus drivers, and presumably travellers, love a nice violent DVD to keep the night going too. And if Jason Statham or any movie with the words Fast of Furious is in the title, than all the better. We are not sure we are comfortable watching a film where the opening scene shows a bus exploding, all the while we are hurtling down the main highway, seven times the speed limit, overtaking petrol tankers which seemed to be driven by children.

We found a cool little pizza bar/restaurant in the old town, named Craft, which is run by a bunch of death metal loving Colombians. The sounds of Sepultura greet you as you walk in the door, and a waitress with more piercings than a teenage mother shouts the specials to you over the anti Christ roars, and then pleasantly seats you with beers and popcorn and a stack of comic books to read while your pizza is being wood fired. They are in Spanish but they feature a chauvinistic sexually frustrated parrot who preys on homeless birds, as in the avian variety, and a turtle who participates in break and enters but seems to get away with it by poking his head back in his shell when the police, who are actually dogs, rock up. Once the pizza is ready (which is massive, and only $3 , and can feed two), the mood is mellowed with a DVD of Pink Floyd’s “The Wall”, and you sit there wondering what in Gods name was that band on, and you ask the waitress to bring you some of it.

Owners would remove llamas legs to prevent theft while locked up

The blind bull was sacked when he failed to bring down the statue

Colombian Pacman NEVER got hassled by the ghosts

Red light district bands. Aptly named.

Colombia also does fruit well. We stopped at a market one afternoon to sample some delicious types of tropical fruit, with exotic amazing names such as Carambolo, Maracuya, or my favourite, Pitala, which is similar to a dragon fruit, except with the extraordinary taste sensation that makes you never want to eat another thing in your life. Which was exactly the way Kylie was feeling on Friday, when a nasty bout of food poisoning hit. It was Independence day in Colombia, so most places were closed, and the rare place we found open on arrival, which ironically should have been closed , was a dodgy hamburger joint, which obviously has the same food supplier as 7 elevens. Two hours later, Miss Genn was singing into the porcelain microphone a tearful ballad.

She recuperated in time for the bike ride, and the activities of the day, which also involved spotting llamas and rabbits in the streets. Odd.

When you think Colombia and sport, you think football or avoiding stray cartel hit men bullets. But the national sport here is Tejo, where you hurl chunks of iron into a clay pit filled with envelopes containing gunpowder. It’s like a cross between discus and terrorism, with the requirement that you drink beer. It’s highly addictive, as most sports are where there is the risk you may lose a digit or part of your face. The Colombians love it, so much so that when we visited just before lunch time, the group we say were sloshed and onto their second case of Aguilar. Or they may have been on their way home from church, it’s hard to know.

We also visited the Police Museum, which is actually a glorified advertisement for Police recruitment in Colombia, but its cool in a way as your tour guide is an off duty cop, but the only real highlight once you get past all the drivel is the gold and diamond encrusted motorcycle that once owned by Pablo Escobar. There is also a small re enactment room, which includes dummies of Escobar and his henchmen, but sadly the artist/creator was either blind or a chicken, as the examples are more suited to a Fraggle Rock episode than an important piece of history.

Our next stop is the peaceful Salento , a town in the coffee region of Colombia.

First we are on the lookout for some decent chocolate. With the necessary demise of drug production in Colombia, the government authorised defoliation of cocoa plantations, which arguably does not make lives happier with the lack of chocolate able to be produced.

Adios.

Tejo. Explosives, rocks and beer. Awesome