What You Need to Know About Bogotá, Colombia

Last Updated on October 10, 2020 by Adam Watts

Here’s what you need to know about Bogotá, Colombia. The city is 2640 meters (8300 feet) above sea level. This means you arrive and get headaches, sniffles, nosebleeds, and you suddenly can’t walk up ten stairs without wheezing like a fat kid with asthma forced to run the 100m at school sports day. It takes some getting used to. While you’re walking up a slight incline clutching your stomach with one hand and wiping your nose with the other, a Colombian woman might jog past you, smile, and say “Hola! Buenos dias!” and you can’t tell if she’s being nice or mocking you. You wheeze, “Buen…os…di…” Ah fuck it, save the energy.

Transport

Because of the altitude, taxis become your friend. There are two kinds of taxis in Bogotá: yellow ones and white ones. White ones are mostly private, with seat belts and intact windows. Yellow ones are driven by toothless men who treat roads as battlegrounds. The latter, being more likely to kill you, are therefore cheaper. Pick wisely, friends. Pick wisely.

What you should know about Bogotá’s traffic is that there’s a lot of it. To combat this, one day the government decided to have a brainstorming session to address the problem. However, many an intern must have been at this brainstorming session because the best solution was suspect at best. It wasn’t “Invest heavily in infrastructure to combat this problem long term!” Or even “Buy more buses!” In fact, somebody must have said, “Let’s inconvenience absolutely everyone as much as possible and only let half the population use the roads at a time!”

That final suggestion was implemented, meaning that only cars with license plates ending in an odd number are allowed to use the roads between 8-10am on Mondays and Wednesdays, even numbers get 8-10am on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and I guess Fridays are casual Fridays where everyone can use the roads but only if the driver wears his pajamas. It’s a strange system and presumably unenforceable. I did also see more than a few license plates that ended in 8 that looked suspiciously like 3s plumped out with marker pen.

Closing Times

I was in Bogotá for work, and that meant working 1-10pm. By the time I got home each night, it was 10.30pm. At 11pm in Paris, New York, Barcelona, Tokyo, Sydney, or basically any major city in the world that doesn’t start with B and end in á, you wouldn’t have a problem finding food. But in Bogotá you do. Most of the time it was okay, but on one occasion only my puppy dog eyes and rain-sodden clothes convinced one nice place – Gato Negro – to stay open just for me. On another occasion, I slumped into a flooded McDonald’s and ate burgers and drank Coke that was diluted by rain dripping from a hole in the ceiling. On another, I gave up entirely and got room service at the hotel and felt very lonely.

The Weather

Okay, enough chit chat. Let’s get serious and talk about the weather; I am British after all. It rains every day in Bogotá. Literally. Like literally literally. My knowledge of weather systems is limited at best. I missed the class at school about high altitude weather systems in urban South America with a particular emphasis on those in the Andes. Suffice to say, it rains a lot in Bogotá. There are always clouds in the sky. I read somewhere that 1997 saw the first clear blue sky anyone in Bogotá in living memory, causing riots, the government declaring a state of emergency, and one family sacrificing their first born son to appease the gods to make the clouds come back. And by the afternoon it clouded over and everyone went back to work.

In the hotel room there was a guidebook that told me, with some pride, that the climate in Bogotá “varies widely from 50F to 70F.” I looked for the rest of the sentence. Presumably they meant the climate varies between 50F and 70F in one season, and other seasons feature ice storms, searing temperatures, and hurricanes. There’s no way they could mean that a swing of only 20 degrees amounts to a “wide variation”. But I never did find the rest of that sentence. Apparently in Bogotá there is a wild, astonishing swing of 20F during the entire year. Or put another way, the warmest day of the year you could wear jeans and a sweater, while on the coldest you’d have to wrap up warm by putting on a very thin jacket.

Summary

Needless to say, Bogotá was far from my favorite city. What you need to know about Bogotá is that you’re probably not going to enjoy it. From the problems caused by high altitude, to the struggle to find dinner at the end of an evening shift, to the depressing weather, there isn’t a lot to love.

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