Colombia Bogota: Day 2

Today, the plan was for us to have meetings in the morning & then leave just after noon for an overnight field trip. We did indeed have meetings all morning -- a series of presentations by our Colombian host organization actually -- but for one reason or another they took longer than expected & it was after 4 pm before we finally got away. We all climbed aboard a bus & headed out of the city towards Sogamosa.

Sogamosa is along highway 55, about a 4 hour drive northeast from Bogota. The drive is a pleasant one not only because highway 55 is a relatively well-maintained throughfare but because the scenery is beautiful. For most of the trip we were winding our way between the Andes which are very high in this area & green all the way to the tops. They do not present such a solid wall of rock as the Rockies do: you could almost believe you were travelling through a series of large hills if you didn’t know you were at nearly 10,000 ft.

This being the tropics, night arrived shortly after 6 pm so the scenery was less obvious. We stopped somewhere on an extreme downhill grade where some little roadside cantinas were serving food. Apparently this is something of a tradition & I can see why the tradition is popular. The speciality is a pastry called arepas: small balls of dough (corn dough? doesn’t quite taste like wheat) stuffed with fresh cheese, patted down to the size & thickness of a hamburger, & gently fried on a grill. Tan deliciosa! They also serve big wedges of fresh cheese along with a sort of soup which looks like consomme but tastes more like a diluted fruit juice, mildly sweet. I had an arepa & tasted somebody else’s fresh cheese & soup.

We got into Sogamosa later than expected, almost 9 pm. By the time we found an open restaurant & got a bite to eat, it was already past my bedtime. Tomorrow is another early start.