Post 3

The move from downtown Bogotá to Chapinero changed everything.  My new hotel – which I highly recommend if you are Bogotá-bound – was a lovingly preserved relic of the 1960s or 1970s; it looked like a set for the TV series Mad Men.  My spacious “junior suite” had a television that revolved so that you could watch it either from the bedroom or the living room.  It also had a full kitchen, including an oven.  I tried to imagine the vacations of yesteryear when Colombian moms baked cakes or roasted chickens while the children swam in the pool or watched the rotating television. 

The staff was gracious and accommodating.  Miguel showed me to my room and told me to call him if I needed anything at all.  I tipped him, thinking that if the wolves howled here, someone would know what to do.  I generally don’t like to be fawned over, but after three days in my bubble of hyper-vigilance, a bit of TLC felt good and a sense of calm descended on me for the first time in days.

It wasn’t just the hotel.  Being in Jules’s neighborhood meant that I could stop spending all my time in Ubers and taxis.  Bogotá is a city of 9 million people without a subway (there are plans to build an above-ground metro system in the next few years).  There is a high-speed bus line that serves certain areas, but this only relieves a fraction of the pressure of millions of people moving around each day, many of whom necessarily rely on cars.  Authorities try to limit the number of cars in the city center, but at peak periods, traffic downtown barely moves at all, meaning that you wait forever for your Uber, which sometimes does not show because it is stuck in traffic or takes another fare it can get to.  People get used to this, as they get used to anything, but I found it stressful, especially since my Spanish is not really good enough for getting around purposes and since, as we have seen, the hyper-vigilant associate taxis with kidnapping.

From my hotel in Chapinero I could now venture out on foot and situate myself.  I gave a talk that very night at the Fundación Andrés Bello and was able to walk to the venue from my hotel.  When the talk was over, I walked back and met Jules somewhere in the neighborhood for dinner.  If downtown Bogotá was gritty and scary, Chapinero seemed like a pleasant suburb with universities and nice bars and restaurants.  It’s all relative, of course; within a few hundred meters of Jules’s apartment there is a settlement of homeless people a bit back in the woods, which does not mean that they are dangerous, just that their situation is precarious.   I think I may treat future visits to Bogotá as working vacations; I’ll just find a decent place to stay in Chapinero, work during the day and have dinner with Jules – or colleagues, if I can find them – in the evening.

The next day, Saturday, Jules showed me around Candelaria, the historical region I had been hoping to stumble on from my downtown Airbnb.  Candelaria is charming, with low-slung, brightly painted homes and stores with clay tile roofs, as well as churches, museums, and government buildings.  Like similar historic areas the world over, it is somewhat touristy, with youth hostels and pricy restaurants, but it was a beautiful day and a nice visit.  We went to the Bolero Museum, which was free and delightful.  We then went to a huge market in the center of downtown, where everyone on a budget comes to shop, and pretty much everyone is on a budget in Bogotá.  The crowds and the music were a relentless assault on the senses.

The next day we toured a coffee farm up in the mountains.  This was my second tour; the first was of certain comunas on the outskirts of town – for marketing purposes, the guides use the Portuguese word favelas – the poor, gang-infested, notorious neighborhoods surrounding Rio de Janeiro.  In Colombia, these settlements were created by people displaced by Colombia’s civil wars, which spanned decades.  Triggered by the assassination of the popular leftist politician Jorge Eliécer Gaitán in 1948, the conflict intensified in the 1960s and continued into the 2010s, involving leftist guerillas, drug lords, and paramilitary groups as well as the Colombian army. 

Most of the fighting occurred in the countryside and displaced people took refuge in the cities, which did not want them, so they built their settlements on the outskirts and tried to eke out a living, even as the cities ignored them and discriminated against them.  Over time, various accords were reached to grant the settlers some of the same rights as urban dwellers, and we visited the comunas via a recently built tramway, which is meant to cut down on the transit time from the settlements to the city.  Refugees from Venezuela have recently settled here too, and the neighborhoods continue to spread up the mountainsides in a sort of refugee sprawl which is visually striking when viewed from above, on the tramway.  On the ground, the comunas seemed dusty and poor but also fairly empty.  I hope everyone was off at work.

The coffee farm was extremely enjoyable, mainly because our host, the owner/manager, was an excellent showman.  She walked and talked us through the process of growing and producing coffee in an ecologically sound way that still makes a profit.  In Colombia – and perhaps elsewhere – tours are a vehicle for the guides to put on a show and work their charisma, and our Colombian guides generally did this very well, being knowledgeable, friendly, and funny in the right proportions.   We were generally lucky with tour members as well.  Notably, on one tour there was a Russian couple who had been traveling when the war in Ukraine started.  They did not want to return to Russia, so are traveling the world, visiting countries that will accept them without a visa, which includes several in Central and South America. I wish them good luck.

On Sunday night, I took an overnight bus to Medellín, the idea being to get out of Jules’s hair so he could get some work done.  This was my second redeye in a week, and a flight from Bogotá to Medellín takes barely half an hour and does not cost much more than the bus, but I hate airports, and the bus seemed like an experience.

I bought my tickets online and they came with a QR code, so I thought I was ready to go.  But when I got to the terminal, there were no signs directing me where to go and what to do.  I eventually figured out that you have to go to the office of your particular bus company, which checks your passport and issues you a ticket, paying no attention to the QR code on your phone.  It appears that there is no Greyhound/Trailways monopoly on bus service in Colombia, and there are perhaps 30 or 40 companies either competing for the same lines or serving different regions.  When you get your ticket, they tell you where to sit and wait for your bus, and everyone gets on the bus when a guy from the company shouts out the time of departure.

The bus itself was perfectly nice, huge and comfortable, maybe Swedish-made.  They kept it ice cold, for some reason, which they must always do, because people showed up with blankets.  I slept as much as I could, enjoying the bus as it swayed through the countryside.

The bus arrived in Medellín an hour and a half early – at 6:00 a.m. instead of 7:30 – which was mystifying to me, although I understood how it happened after taking the bus back to Bogotá, of which more in a later post.  My Airbnb would not be available until 2:00…I had gone online and located a library not too far from my place, and had planned to spend a few hours working there, but it would not open until 9:00 or 10:00. 

I sat in the bus station for a while trying to figure out what to do.  Even at 6:00 a.m., the station was full and lively; it’s a large station and I guess a major hub.  I chatted as well as I could with the friendly people around me, which made me wish that my Spanish was better.

Finally I decided to take a taxi to the address of my Airbnb in the hopes that it was the kind of building where there might be someone to help me out, but the taxi driver could not find the address.  In principle, addresses in Colombia are simple:  all cities are divided into carreras and calles – avenues, which run north and south, and streets, which run east and west – most of which are numbered.  The address of my hotel in Bogotá for example was Calle 66 #8-23, meaning the intersection of 66^th street and 8^th avenue; 23 indicates how far it is away from 8^th avenue.  This is all well and good, but cities often add or remove or reroute streets; imagine what happens when a developer builds an entire neighborhood.  Then they add numbers to the letters:  Calle 66a, 66b, 66c…And people seem not to be fastidious about putting numbers on their houses.  So the taxi driver dropped me in the general area and I walked back to a café I had noticed to have a coffee and something to eat.

While eating, I sent a message to my host, telling him I had arrived early and wondering if there was any chance I could in get before 2:00.  He was extremely gracious, and by maybe 10:00 a.m. I was in a workspace in the building, and my room was ready maybe an hour later, three hours early.  When Airbnb works, it works well.

I confess I have little impression of Medellín.  I did a city bike tour which was fine, but Medellín seemed to be a city without many sights to see.  Navigating the busy city on a bike was fun, though.  I also did a day-long tour of Guatapé, which was disappointing.  The highlight of the trip is the Pedra de Peñal, a huge rock that juts out from the top of a high hill overlooking lakes and valleys, a bit like the overhead scenes from the Netflix series Ozark.  The view from the rock was indeed spectacular, but the trip was full of stops designed to keep us amused and take our money.  It was fun to feed the alpacas, although they were not friendly at all and solely focused on the carrots. The rest of the trip was forgettable.

I’ll keep two memories of Medellín.  The first was a lunch with three professors from a local university, made possible by the good graces of someone who follows Reading the China Dream.  He told me that through his work, he has contacts all over the world and offered to share them with me.  I said I was going to Colombia, and I had a lovely meal in an outdoor restaurant on the campus of Universidad EAFIT.  It was delightful to talk with local intellectuals about China, Colombia, Canada, research, children, life…I am not skilled at getting myself into situation on my travels where I talk at length with local people, although I always imagine that this is going to happen. 

The second was my experience with my Airbnb.  The apartment was located in a neighborhood called Laureles, which is quiet and upper middle-class, the kind of place where families have maids who walk their dogs.  It was a nice refuge after Bogotá and the bus ride, and was quite different from Medellín as a whole, which is a party city.  I ate lunch at the same little place two days in a row, and chatted a bit with the owner who remebered me from the day before, and the next morning went back to the same coffee shop where I had gone the first day. 

This was the beginning of a routine, and I realized that as much as I like living out of a carry-on bag and taking the redeye, familiarity and comfort are nice too.  Maybe what I’m looking for are my own hideaways in different corners of the world, places where I can work in peace but then wander down to a restaurant or a café or a bar where I might see someone I know and have a conversation.  Moving among four or five of those might be nice, from a beach to the mountains to a suburb of a busy city to a cottage in the countryside.  Like Jason Bourne, say, but without his demons, and without the CIA trying to kill me.

By the way, should anyone be inspired to learn about Colombia and its place in the modern world, I highly recommend starting with Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s masterpiece Retrospective, (also available of course in the original Spanish edition, Volver la vida atrás, and in French, Une retrospective, and surely in other languages as well).  It tells the story of the Cabrera family, which fled Spain in the 1930s when Franco came to power, and eventually settled in Colombia, where they became artists and revolutionaries.  Fausto, the father, accepted an invitation to the People’s Republic of China in the early 1960s to establish Spanish language programs there, taking the entire family with him. 

Their stay in China only increased their commitment to the revolution, and the children, Sergio and Marianella, born in 1950 and 1952, respectively, became Red Guards and received military training in China in preparation for their mission, which was to bring the Maoist revolution to Colombia.  When they returned to Colombia, they joined the guerillas and spent difficult years fighting in the mountains before tiring of the struggle (as always, revolutionaries are people too, which means some of them are petty tyrants).  Although this is not part of the book, Sergio Cabrera was recently named Colombian ambassador to China.  The book is amazing, the kind of page-turner that is very hard to put down.