La Comida de Bogotá

After spending the first few months of our trip eating our way through fastfood outlets and IHOPs in the US, and limited choices of local cuisine in the Caribbean, arriving in Colombia was like stepping into food paradise. While the range of local food can't be compared to the offerings in Singapore, it has kept me more than happy during our 2 weeks here in Bogota. Being able to sample a new food item everyday at a cheap price gives me something to look forward to after 3 hours of Spanish lessons.

Hostel Food

One of the first meals we had was in the hostel - a weekly Thursday night BBQ at COP 8,000 (US$4) per person. Eating off the table tennis table was a good opportunity to get to know our fellow hostel guests who hailed from Korea, England, America, etc. When it came to the food however, variety was limited to beef fillets, salted baked potatoes, grilled bananas and some guacamole. The staff were frantically tossing the meats on the grill and went into a fanning frenzy in order to feed the hungry guests. The beef got charred on the outside but was left raw on the inside. We didn't sign up for the BBQ held the following week.

Thursday night BBQs at the hostel

Colombian Set Lunches

We read about the value-for-money Colombian set lunches costing US$1.50-2.50 and the hostel pointed us to a small restaurant down the street called Don Rafa. Not knowing how the set lunches work, we had a rather frustrating conversation with the staff when placing our order. That said, humans, when faced with conversational hurdles, inevitably find a way to communicate with one another through gestures, half-guesses and common words in our languages like "pasta"! Now we're pros at ordering the Colombian set lunch!

Basically, you get to choose an item under each of the following food categories:
- Sopa y frutas: soup (usually with vegetables) or fruit
- Carnes: pollo (chicken) or carne (beef), cooked in different styles
- Principals: pasta, verdura (veggies), frijoles (beans, ugh), patatas fritas (chips) or ensalada (guacamole salad)
- Jugos: usually mora (raspberry), fresa (strawberry), mango (well, mango), lulo (passionfruit) or pina (pineapple)

Every plate comes with a serving of egg fried rice, salad and half a grilled banana. For COP 5,000 (US$2.50), it's awfully good-value-for money and leaves us stuffed till dinnertime.

Digging into our first hard-earned lunch at Don Rafa - sopa verdura, pollo, pasta y pina.

Not much choice when it comes to soup - it's always veggie soup with a mixture of root veggies and lentils. My favourite is ajiaco - which, due to some herb in it, is more tasty than regular soup

Set lunch at a restaurant in Zipaquira after visiting the Salt Cathedral. COP 6,000 (US$3) I had the fried chicken, which was REALLY good.

Back at Don Rafa - our favourite eatery. I had the sobrebarriga asada as the choice of meat - roast beef (from the flank of the cow, literally "over the belly") Muy muy decliciosa!

Other Restaurants in La Candelaria

We tried some of the other food offerings in the La Candelaria area. Each dish doesn't cost more than COP 4,500 (US$2.25). Smaller items like desserts or sweets, such as arroz con leche (a rice pudding with milk and topped with raisins) cost less.

Arepa con chorizo. Arepas are small doughy pancakes made of white corn. Totally tasteless, so it's usually served as a side as part of a bigger meal.

Banjera paisa - typically Bogotan. A massive serving of food comprising rice, minced beef, beans, an arepa, a chorizo sausage, a grilled banana, a slice of avocado and a huge slab of deep fried pork lard.

Tamal - reminded me alot of our meat dumpings (bak chang or zhong zi) back home. Instead of rice, corn meal is used to enclose the meat (usually chicken) and is then wrapped in leaves and steamed. Absolutely yummy. We ate it, together with Vincent from Taiwan, and lamented about missing Dumpling Festival (held in July) back home in Asia.

Chocolate Santefereño - a Colombian tradition. Hot chocolate served with a buttered bun, a puff pastry and slab of cheese. You dunk the cheese into the chocolate.

Western Tastes: We checked out a pizza place nearby which the hostel recommended. We also made a pilgrimage to a fastfood outlet serving fried chicken to satisfy Dan's cravings (no KFC here!)

Enjoying a simple set lunch at Pizza Poli - a slice of freshly-baked pizza and a drink for COP 4,400 (US$2.20)

Donning guantes (gloves) for his oily meal - fried chicken, salted baked potatoes, fried bananas, and a drink (COP 5,000 or US$2.50)

No fried chicken for me, thank you. I had pechunga a la plancha - grilled chicken breast for COP 6.000 (US$3) Also served with salted potatoes, fried banana and an arepa.

Street Food!

Everybody loves street food! And Bogota has plenty of it! There's grilled corn on the cob, meat skewers topped with a small potato, fresh slices of coconut or coconut candies cooked in brown sugar, hot black coffee poured from thermos flasks and served in tiny cups (called tinto), cut fruits (mango, papaya, guava) and fruit juices (like soursop or guanabana as it is called here.) I'm not really into skewered meat cooked on the streets but personally love anything sweet or doughy. Here are some of our favourite street snacks:

Empanadas - similar to the curry puff, but the pastry is made of corn meal instead of flour. Filled with chicken, beef or veggies and eaten with a variety of dips. Empanadas with meat cost about COP 1,300 or US$0.65.

Obleas are our favourite. Light, sweet and crispy. They must be really popular with the locals too cos there are dozens of vendors selling obleas on the streets. Depending on what spreads you choose, an oblea can cost anything between COP 1,000 to COP 2,000 (US$0.50-$1)

This vendor was very proud of her Mickey Mouse wafers

Choose from a selection of spreads - mora (raspberry jam), dulce de leche (sweetened milk), arequipa (caramel), queso (grated cheese) and peanuts.

We chose mora, arequipa and dulce de leche, which are spread on a wafer and sandwiched with another.

On Independence Day, we took a walk around Plaza Bolivar which was bursting with activity. Food vendors were out in full force. We discovered a couple of new food items served on carts, which are not usually seen on a normal day. We tried bunuelos and avena - which reminded me a little of the soya bean milk and pancake combo at home. Bunuelos are deep fried balls of cheesy dough, fried to a golden crisp on the outside but the inside remains white and fluffy. Avena is a chilled oatmeal drink which Colombians are raised on, as an alternative to milk. Apparently, most Latin Americans are highly lactose intolerant and don't take diary products.

The buñuelo y avena combo for COP 2,000 (US$1)

I don't know exactly what these are called - helatinas, I think. Basically sticks of marshmallow.

This guy was doing a roaring business on Independence Day. We caved in and bought a soft-serve ice-cream, topped with chocolate sauce and rainbow sprinkles for COP 800 (US$0.40)

At Montserrat (which we will do a blog entry on later), we came across a market place where various open-air stalls were hawking local delicacies. We gave the intestine stews and scary-looking sausages a miss though. We saw some people spooning into some colourful red and white snacks, which turned out to be cheesy curd paired with your choice of mermalada (marmalade - a huge slab of it!) or arequipa.

Red and white - a new National Day snack for Singapore?

The panaderias - or bakeries - here are quite a draw. The bread and cakes aren't exactly unique, and don't taste very nice at times, but the aroma wafting from the street side ovens is just heavenly and we occasionally stepped into one to buy a bun or a Swiss roll.

A Swiss roll? Just after wiping out a super heavy lunch set at Zipaqueria.

Fruits: Typically tropical fare - like what we have back home: papayas, soursop, bananas, mango, guava and the imported stuff like apples and oranges. What really tickled my bones was this tiny tiny comb of bananas we came across while shopping at Carrefour, even smaller than the small pisangs we have at home.

A whole bunch can fit into the palm of my hand!

Coffee: What's a visit to Colombia without sampling Colombian coffee? Besides buying a cup of tinto from the coffee carts along the street, you can also enjoy a cuppa at one of the chic cafes like Juan Valdez. A cup here costs less than one at Starbucks (not that there are any Starbucks outlets here) and tastes really good! Except for an ocassional craving for a kopi-peng, I'm not a coffee-drinker (refuse to get entrenched in the I-need-a-coffee-to-start-the-day habit) and I hate coffee-breath, but just had to give the coffee here a go.

Queueing up for a cuppa at Juan Valdez - all prepared to place my order in Spanish

The courtyard at Juan Valdez is a nice place to relax and people-watch - as long as you make your way back before dark.

Cooking

While food in Bogota is relatively cheap, dining in a restaurant would still cost more eating out back home at a coffee shop or hawker centre. To save money, we only eat out in the day because of the availability of cheap set lunches and it's safe to walk or take the bus during the daytime (or so we were lead to believe, until the stupid robbers found us.) If we went out at night, we would have to spend extra dough on cab fare.

Being rather lazy cooks, we are limited to eating either instant noodles or simple pasta dishes. We started off on the wrong note - trying to cook pasta with just basil pesto and nothing else (we hadn't discovered the cheap combo of sausages and ham packaged together at the supermarket yet.) It was DISGUSTING. I almost died from my own cooking and Dan accused me of trying to murder him.

Is my cooking really THAT hard to eat?!

We were saved from more bad food when we discovered pre-packaged Oriental-flavoured pasta (you just dump the whole packet into boiling water) going at 50% off at the nearby supermarket. However, we're pleased to annouce that through a daily trial-and-error process, I'm now churning out pretty good pasta for dinner every night! Whoo hoo! And I estimate that we're spending less than COP 4,000 (US$2) for a dinner for 2.

To wrap up, we are enjoying our food in Bogota and can't wait to sample other local delicacies in other parts of Colombia - even hormigas culonas - literally ants with huge asses in the Santader region!

Eat on!

Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Blue

Haha... no, the we're not getting married again! But married life sure is great.

The wife did something really sweet the other night. After I purchased my new camera, I was talking about getting a small pouch so that the LCD will not get scratched.

"No need", she said. "I'll make one for you tonight."

So, while I was pulling my hair out while being totally frustrated with T-Mobile (and yet trying to be polite), she was going back to her Home Economics days. After a bit of snipping and sewing, look what she made!

"Borrowed" the velcro from my old Olympus pouch

Not bad, eh? I got something new out of something old. Some of you may be able to immediately identify where this blue cloth came from, after all, our travel wardrobe is really quite limited.

She promised to wear only the remainder of her blue top when we visit our next nude beach

Yup. That was a huge amount of cloth she used! Why? Simply because I had said that one layer was not sufficient protection for my camera. So this small little pouch is actually double-layered!

It's like making a molehill out of a mountain!

So sweet, right? :)

Finger Lickin' Good

Okay, enough doom and gloom in the last few entries. We're glad to introduce the nicer side of Bogota to the world. This entry was meant to be posted much earlier, but got superseded by all the bad stuff which happened, which is a shame. And since our readers back home are probably suffering the weekly bout of Monday blues today, we hope that this picture-heavy entry will bring some cheer to the start of your week.

On one of the weekends in Bogota, we made a day trip to Zipaquira to visit La Catedral de Sal - literally "the Salt Cathedral". Together with our new Taiwanese friend, Vincent, we embarked on the first leg of the journey - a 40-minute ride on the Transmileno.

The Transmileno is said to have revolutionised Bogota's public transport system. It's pretty much like our MRT back home, except that instead of overhead or underground tracks, the Transmileno buses run along designated lanes (a bit like our bus lanes) and instead of trains, passengers ride on bendy-buses. It costs COP 1,500 (approx US$0.75) per trip, regardless of time or distance traveled.

The Transmileno bus-stops are not like anything we've seen before. They function like bus terminals where there are designated boarding points for different bus services, but are built like MRT stations, complete with platforms and sliding doors.

Inside one of the "bus-stops" for the Transmileno

The hardest part of taking the Transmileno is figuring out the transport map. Although it initially looks less intimidating than the complex tangle of coloured lines representing the New York City subway or the London Tube, Bogota's version requires alot more brain cells to be sacrificed in deciphering the colour codes. After getting incredibly lost on our first ride, we managed to decode the mass of colours and now move around town confidently on the Transmileno. Sometimes more so than the locals (who have, on occasion, asked us where to drop off.)

Somewhere over the rainbow lies our stop

Meeting Vincent made us effectively multilingual - learning Spanish while conversing in English, Mandarin and a smattering of Hokkien.

View of Bogota's city streets from inside the Transmileno. Picture taken by the Canon SX200 in "colour accent" mode. Muy cool.

At Bogota's Porte de Norte, we searched amongst the hoards of inter-city buses and hopped onto the one marked "Zipa" - short for Zipaquira. The inter-city bus was much older than the Transmileno and looks more like a (non-airconditioned) coach, costing COP 3,400 (approx US$1.70) for the hour-long ride. Halfway through the trip, a conductor comes around to collect the fare and peanut vendors come onboard to hawk their wares.

Going to Zipaquira on the inter-city bus

Zipaquira was abuzz with activity, it being the long holiday weekend to mark Colombia's Independence Day the following Monday. We walked up a lovely pedestrian mall lined with shops, towards the salt mines.

Avocados are pretty popular side dishes in Colombian fare, eaten with a pinch of salt

Cresting the first stretch of the hillside, we found ourselves in a large town square. Although the salt mines are suppose to be a short 15-minute walk from the bus stop, we found ourselves taking much longer as we kept stopping to take in the sights (especially the local food!) and to soak in the festive atmosphere.

In front of a church that reminds me very much of a sandcastle

Checking out local wares - steaming hot tamales, crepes, soups, pastries, etc.

The Colombians in Zipaquira have quite a sense of humour when choosing decorations for their building facades. Giant butterflies here...

... a colony of leaf-cutter ants covering another building...

... and a heated stand-off between a steely bull and a wiry man here.

Stopping, gawking and snapping every few steps. The expression on my face tells Dan that he's taking way too many pictures here.

Lost in the hustle and bustle of the marketplace, we strayed too far from the turn-off towards the salt mines and once again, got lost. Stuttering in broken Spanish, we managed to ask one of the locals which direction we should be heading in. Gesturing madly, with grand sweeping motions towards the right of the town square, he repeated "Zooooosshhhh, deracha (to the right)!! Zoooooooshhh! Derecha!" We got the idea.

Uphill from the Zipaquira town centre, near the entrance to the salt mines

La Catedral de Sal is built in the salt mines, where salt is still being extracted. Visitors and worshippers enter the cathedral through a series of tunnels from which the salt has been removed. The original cathedral was built in a cave inside the mines in 1954 and has since deterioted. A new one was built in 1995, 180m below the surface. Entry into the cathedral is COP 15,000 (approx US$7.50), which isn't cheap. It costs less to visit on a Wednesday (COP 10,000). Apparantly, the Great Cross that emerges from the crack that is the entrance, when projected onto the town square, symbolises the union of the town. Or something like that.

All set to go deep down, 180m underground

Walking down through the tunnels towards the cathedral, as blinking eyes adjust to the darkness, visitors will come across 14 crosses carved out of or into the salt walls, commerating the various stages of the Way of the Cross, which in turn depicts Jesus Christ's final hours before his crucifixion. Each station is designed by a different artist and is subtly but beautifully bathed in gentle coloured lights.

The route through the tunnels is said to prepare the pilgrim as he transcends from an external, material world into a conceptual, interior world. From the terrastrial, to the spiritual. As we told Vincent, in a language he's familiar with, "si beh cheem ah."

Light eminating from the crucifix carved into the wall

Trying out the stone-hard pews.... oww

Many of the crosses are really big. This one seems to be rising from the skies, bathed in heavenly light

The biggest cross of all, seen from afar. You can see tiny human-shapes in front of it. A trumpeter angel carved in stone stands out against the lurid green background.

Crucifixes aren't the only things carved in salt here. Delicate angels, perched on rocky ledges and hovering high above our heads, looked down upon us. Joseph, Mary, baby Jesus and a couple of barn residents also put together a heartwarming nativity scene.

Angels we have heard on high

Away in the manger, no crib for a bed

You can see the softness in the angel's wings, hair and robes despite it being carved out of hard mineral. Lovely.

The blessed babe watched over by angels

We finally reached the cathedral, 180m below ground. It was a very quiet, awe-inspiring and humbling experience just sitting on the pews or standing before the altar. Just imagine the cave echoing with voices of people singing hymms on a Sunday and the strong voice of a priest leading all in prayer. Wow.

Having a quiet moment

The pillars supporting the roof of the cathedral are so HUGE and perfectly symmetrical

No visit to a tourist attraction is complete without the, well, touristy stuff. Visitors pop out from the cathedral and into a cave dotted with souvenir kiosks and, get this, a cafe. Kitschy as it all seems, the idea of a cafe in a cave is actually really cool. Dan entertained the thought of getting a small crucifix carved out of salt for his parents. We decided that it would probably (a) get wet and dissolve; (b) break; or (c) disintegrate, during some point of the trip and so didn't get anything in the end.

Freshly brewed Colombian coffee served in a cave

The craziest part of the tour had to be the 3D movie at the end of it, which is included in the ticket price. Visitors don red-and-blue paper spectacles and are treated to an animation telling the story of how the tunnels and cathedral were created using a complex system of explosives. It was a pity that the spectacles were rather poorly made - the red cellophane was way too opaque and made us feel super sleepy - cos the animation was actually quite well done.

We may have missed Ice Age 3 and Up but we still got to watch a 3D movie on this trip

Some readers may be asking - was all this really carved out of salt? How did we know it wasn't just some ordinary rocky cave made of other types of minerals?

Well, we scrapped at the walls and gathered the crusty white crystals that fell into our palms.

Then we licked them.

And yes, they definitely tasted very salty.

Living life with a pinch of salt

PS: Pictures taken with Dan's Canon SX200 The First, before it got camera-napped. And with my Sony Cybershot (I miss shooting with my 450D!)