Mountain Top Fun in Boge

After spending a couple hours underground looking at salt religious stuff, if seemed only natural to go as high up in the air as we could to do the same. Welcome to Montserrat church on a mountain overlooking the city of Bogota. At roughly 10,000 feet, this steps up to this baby have a profound effect on one's breathing.

As a side note, I feel I must add a tourist's advisory here. If I were you I would not (emphasis on NOT) walk up the steps to the top, but take the gondola or tram-thing. I wouldn't even walk up to the place where you get in the gondola or tram-thing. We did, the first day we went to see Montserrat and we didn't make it.

I have lived in Colombia a grand total of two and a half years and I can honestly say that, until this trip to Bogota I have never felt physically threatened. Notice that "until"? On the way up to the tourist entrance to Montserrat, the neighborhoods went from nice to way beyond sketchy in about a hundred meters and five street kids decided to take my camera bag. My favorite part about this was the fact that the most ambitious street kid, the one with the biggest balls, the one who basically attacked me, could tell I was a Gringo and so, grabbing at my camera bag strap, was saying what he could in English, part of which was "Thank you." It was kind of charming.

I am grateful for cheap camera bag straps, which break. I had a nice tussle with a handfull of these drugged-up kids, all of whom, towards the end of this adventure, pulled out little knives which none of them was willing to use, and eventually ran off when we were able to get a couple cabs to stop and take our less than (shall we say) composed selves to the police station. A couple of us returned to the scene of the crime (leaving our camera bags, passports and watches at the station) with the police, who searched the place, found one kid, handcuffed him up in the back of a police pickup truck, and brought us back when it started raining, but left the kid in that back of the police truck.

Anyway, the next day we made it Montserrat, and I took some pictures, Sorry I don't have any pictures of me and the kids fighting over my cameras and passport.