He’s 5ft 5in tall and weighs barely more than nine stone, yet Nairo Quintana can take much of the credit for Bogota’s standing as the South American city with the highest ratio of cyclists to population. Quintana might not have won the Tour de France yet – he’s been runner-up twice– but the specialist climber is inspiring the young to eschew four wheels in favour of two, a trend that might one day put an end to the smog that frequently chokes the Colombian capital.
As elsewhere, cyclists in Bogota are divided into tribes. First there’s the whistleblower, who carves his way through the city with short blasts on a whistle to clear pedestrians. Kitted out with a bling helmet, designer shades and stubble, the whistleblower is the fastest of the cyclepath warriors.
Then there’s the dead header, who can’t live without his music (though he might die with it too, since his headphones block out the sound of car horns and incoming whistleblowers). He usually forgoes the helmet.
The fast laner is too cool for cyclepaths, preferring instead to mix it up with the cars, lorries and buses on Bogota’s main thoroughfares, riding on a stripped-down racing bike as he jockeys his way through the pack. The downhill demon is a mud-splattered mountain biker with a full-face helmet, goggles, shin guards, knee guards and body armour who films himself on his GoPro as he flies out of the bushes. Hidden under the mud is a bike that costs more than a small car.
When not cycling, the Lycra goddess is often seen on Bogota’s Sunday ciclovia (a road temporarily closed to traffic) accompanied by a small dog on a long lead. The domicilio dodger, meanwhile, weaves in and out of traffic with 50 kilos of groceries on his bike rack as he delivers items to residents rich and lazy enough to renounce doing their own shopping. The BMXer is the tough-looking guy with ear studs, tattoos and a fake designer baseball cap riding an improbably small bike through traffic in the wrong direction. And finally the frankenbiker is the everyday cyclist who rides a bike cobbled together from spare parts, having had several good steeds stolen in the past and working on the theory that nobody will lift this one.
It’s not all sprockets and puncture-proof rubber in Colombia, however. There’s the enduring cultural ripples of Shakira, the music and dance phenomenon now living in Spain with her footballer partner Gerard Pique of Barcelona and their three-year-old son. There is Paulina Vega, who until last December reigned as Miss Universe and has experienced the obligatory Twitter spat with US presidential hopeful and then owner of the Miss Universe Organisation Donald Trump (he labelled her a hypocrite for not giving up her title after she denounced his anti-Mexican immigrants diatribe).
There is also the spectre of the country’s interminable drug war, though negotiators from the government and left-wing rebel group FARC are on course to agree the full terms of a peace agreement to end 50 years of bloody conflict. And zika, the mosquito-borne virus most recently seen in alarming numbers in Brazil, has begun to cross into Colombia, with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office advising against travel to two ports on the country’s Pacific coast.
Once you’re in Bogota, though, it’s the music flowing from the street PA systems, the salsa and the constant stream of compliments paid by men to women at any time of day or night that grab you. Only in Colombia are yellow pants worn on December 31 while on Valentine’s Day, which falls in September, the favoured colour is red.
Besides passion, the world of nature is an area in which Colombia excels. Here you can find all the climates of the world, with different species of animals and plants depending on the altitude of the location. There exist all kinds of crops in Colombia that grow throughout the year thanks to the country’s proximity to the equator.
Within the country’s borders you can go from sea level to more than 5,000 metres above sea level and experience all five global climates, with snow in the glacial areas. At around 2,000m Bogota falls into the cold zone (12-17C), while Medellin (at 1,000m and 17-24C) is temperate and perfect for coffee growing. Cartagena, on the northern coast, is where things heat up, with average temperatures above 25C.
Abundance is the name of the game. In the lush green landscapes all things exotic thrive, including fruits such as lulo, guanabana, uchuva and the prickly eguanyana. There are also glorious flowers, sumptuous vegetables, plenty of livestock and no fewer than 1,878 species of bird. It’s no wonder the people seem so generous.
One such individual is Pablo Restrepo, who owns a specialist rose farm called Excellente. A perfectionist, he spares me a physical tour of his business in favour of a virtual one, showing me six sheets of paper on which every detail of his rose beds is clearly marked. His wife wears the trousers and makes full use of the conjugal credit card, which he apparently encourages. “You see,” he explains, “a flower is like a woman – it needs lots of love and attention.
“You have to help nature,” he adds, elaborating on his success with flowers. I leave him having learned that a rose is composed of 75 per cent water, has only four days of fragrance and, once cut, lasts a maximum of 18 days.
In Salento, west of Bogota, I meet Juan Echeverri, a coffee farmer educated in Britain who insists on telling me about his schooldays where upon receiving the cane he had to say, “Thank you father.” But it is coffee which is on my agenda and at Echeverri’s Hacienda Venecia I am soon discovering the extraordinary lengths his staff go to in its production. Basket in hand, I pick some of the two-seeded coffee cherries. It is astonishing to think that one cup of coffee requires 45 seeds and that it takes 40 kilos of the original cherry to give one-tenth of that weight in roasted coffee.
With all the remarkable produce it’s easy to forget the minerals in which Colombia is also blessed, especially gold and emeralds. At the Gold Museum in downtown Bogota I absorb as much as possible about modern Colombians’ tribal forebears, who combined logic and superstition. Containers were like women: they held substances yet to be transformed, so the ashes of the dead were kept in urns shaped like gourds or pregnant women, as though they were soon to give birth to new life. Birds were fundamental symbols of the shaman: both could fly, see long distances and their domains spanned both earth and sky.
These days Bogota is a thoroughly modern city of around eight million souls known as Rolos (the joke is they can’t roll their Rs). Medellin, on the other hand, is flooded with call centres as the dialect is the most comprehensible. As a consequence of a new metro system and pioneers in plastic surgery and organ transplants, Medellin was dubbed the most innovative city in the world in 2013 by the Wall Street Journal, a far cry from 20 or 30 years ago when it was considered the world’s most violent city, largely due to the activities of drug lord Pablo Escobar and his Medellin cartel. Twenty-three years after Escobar’s death at the hands of the police, the city and the vast majority of Colombia are safe and beguiling destinations for the adventurous traveller.
TRAVEL NOTES
Getting there
Avianca has return flights direct from Glasgow to Bogota via London Heathrow from £607. Visit avianca.com.
Where to stay
Movich Chico 97 in central Bogota has double rooms from £65 per night including breakfast. Movich Hotel Cartagena de Indias in Cartagena has double rooms from £176 per night including breakfast. Visit movichhotels.com.
Hacienda Venecia has double rooms from £30 per night. Visit coffee.haciendavenecia.com. Lunch and dinner cost £6 each and the coffee tour costs £9.
The Hotel Intercontinental Medellin has double rooms from £70 per night; breakfast for two people costs an additional £7. Visit intercontinental.com.
Other information
The Gold Museum in Bogota is open Tuesday-Sunday and admission costs 70p. Visit banrepcultural.org/museo-del-oro. For more information on visiting Colombia see colombia.travel.
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