Bogota by Chance

One May we tried to fly Spirit to San Pedro Sula in Honduras. Connecting in Ft. Lauderdale like nearly all flights to “the Americas” we arrived Friday evening and waited for our flight in the bar. The connection was scheduled so late (or early depending on how you look at it) that it felt like we were deploying with the military again. Right about closing time we saw our flight had been cancelled. This was the second time Spirit had canceled flights to Honduras. You can read about the first here, but come back for this story. The excuse was that there weren’t any fire crew at the airport in San Pedro Sula so no flights were allowed in.

Well, we’d been down this road before so we patiently waited in line with a number of angry people. The gate agent had to deal with the typical tantrums so we must have been refreshing. When he told us he couldn’t get us to our destination for a day or so, Bella asked “can you just send us to Cancun?” 

He was pretty shocked, but quickly asked “Why did you ask about Cancun? Was it just the first place you thought of? How about Bogata? I can get you there by noon and you’ll still be home by Sunday evening.” That sounded like a great idea.

We were a little nervous about flying to Honduras so we didn’t have our cell phones with us. Crazy, right? Our new friend leant us his so we could cancel our pre-purchased hotel and he even helped us get a return flight from Cancun for a later date. That’s a far cry from the tantrum throwing passengers who were so belligerent the agents had to call the police to get them to settle down.

By the time all of that was sorted out we didn’t have time to get to a hotel so we decided to get some sleep. Since we were in Florida the air-conditioning was the typical “see your breath” cold. The alternative was outside, under the overpass between terminals. And we weren’t alone.

We arrived without hotel reservations which confused the immigration officer. We (Bella!) had to explain to her boss what happened and we were finally allowed to enter their country for a quick weekend visit. We took a cab to the Plaza Bolivár in the center of the city.

We found a hotel for $60 by walking since we didn’t have any way of getting to the internet. I had an old iPod Touch but the battery didn’t last long enough to do any searches.

Bogotá is known for their graffiti.

We rode a cable car to the top of the mountain of Monserrate, which dominates the center of the city. The cost was $4.500 Colombian pesos, which is about $1.50 USD. Worth every penny!

We rode the funicular back down to the base.

We spent the rest of the day walking around the capital area.

This cathedral was striking.

We were really happy with the trip. It wouldn’t have been possible if we had checked bags because we didn’t have any place to store anything more than our tiny fanny packs as we walked around the city. Unfortunately we didn’t have our DLSRs with us, either. Just some cheap digital cameras that did a serviceable job.

~ Freddy