First Impressions of BOGOTA - Colombia's Mega City 🇨🇴

This is Bogota, capital of Colombia, sprawling megacity of over 12 million people, one of the largest in South America, but not without its quiet spots where you can get away from it all. Bogota is a fascinating city with many different sides to it and today I'll show you a few. This was my first video from Colombia, my entry point to this great country which I'll be showing you over this next video series. I hope you enjoy Colombia and I hope you enjoy this, Bogota, a city like no other. Okay friends, welcome to the streets of Bogota, Colombia. I'm currently in a part of the city called La Candelaria. Whenever I forget the name I just think of the candle. I don't know if that's actually what it means or not but it helps me remember. It's a beautiful part of the city, very historic. I believe this is the oldest part of Bogota and today it's very popular with tourists. A lot of hostels, a lot of accommodations, a lot of things to do and see around this area and one very popular thing to do and see is where I'm taking you to right now. We are going up into the mountains. Now as a matter of fact we are already up in the mountains just by matter of being in Bogota. I believe it's the highest city I've ever been at in my life actually and as you look around the sky... oh my god I just tripped. Always be careful with the sidewalks in Latin America. What I was trying to say is that the skyline of the city is scattered with mountains just to remind you of the terrain on which Bogota is built and one of the mountains actually I think I can see it right in front of me is called Montserrat and it has a beautiful lookout to take in the city and I do know that Montserrat is not far from here so yeah that could be it. Look the sun is shining on it as we speak. First I just got to meet a couple friends. They were staying at the same hostel as me. They just checked out and moved to another hostel and we're gonna go check out this hike together see if we can find them. Okay I'm here with my new friends. This is Lucas. Hey. What's up? Sebastian in the back with the directions right? Exactly. And you spent like three months in Colombia you said? Yeah. How are you liking it so far? It's so nice like the people the culture like yeah it's so different from back home. And where's home? I'm from Denmark. Crazy big difference from here huh? Yeah yeah we don't have any mountains or anything so yeah. Yeah we've got our highest point the sky mountain like 140 meters. Get a little taste of some of the artwork all around Bogota. I mean I've heard that you can do some street art tours in the city but to be honest you can just walk around wherever and you're going to find stuff on your own as well. Interesting mix of architecture. You can see like the classic buildings that we have here in La Cadena de la Ria with some mid-rise buildings with some tall skyscrapers behind it. All kinds of stuff here in Bogota. So we're now walking past the place called Universidad Los Andes. I guess this is like a student area. There's definitely a few universities around this part of Bogota. So you got an interesting mix of that like historic center of the city right next to the student area. But yeah lots of people around here lots going on today. Do you have any tip for any traveler who just arrives in Colombia? I mean just like take a walk hang out with some of the locals like ask for direction ask for advice. Sebastian how about you anything to add? Don't plan your trip too much just go with the flow meet some people have a lot of free time so you have the freedom to do whatever you want. Okay so now Sebastian has taken us down the middle of a highway. This is what happens when you follow two Danish people on a hike in Colombia. Nah but in all seriousness what they were saying about going with the flow is is great travel advice. 3,152 meters above sea level. That is pretty high my friends. That is pretty high. So there's a couple options. You can take the cable car or you can hike. My two new friends are going to take the hike. I'm going to be lazy. The lazy Canadian today. I'm taking the cable car. So I'm going to get a round trip. $23,500 for the cable car. These days $40,000 is about 10 US dollars so that's I guess that's about six bucks. Six bucks to get up and down. Not too bad I would say. Not too bad. As you can already see it's more than just a lookout. There's some old buildings. Yeah I mean I guess there was a community up here. This is really cool. But I don't like that. Why do people have to do that? I mean you know it's not a rock. You're carving your name into a living creature. Not sure why people think they got to do stuff like that but let's not give any more attention to the idiots. There's enough of them out there aren't there? There's a wish pond. Let's make a little wish. I'm going to wish for world peace. Maybe I need more than 100 pesos peace to get world peace but we'll see huh? We'll see. If we get world peace in 2022 you know who to thank okay. I don't know if we'll ever find our buddies from Denmark. This place is way bigger than I thought it was. But anyway you might have noticed on the ride up I was wearing my noise cancelling headphones. Speaking of noise as some noisy thing drives by. This is actually a trick I learned from a buddy of mine in Montreal. I was talking about how much I love noise cancelling headphones for like flying and just getting rid of the noise on airplanes and stuff like that and he said yeah they're also great when you visit some cathedral or some really cool place with a lot of tourists. You can just put on your noise cancelling headphones, put on your favorite music and just experience it as if no one else is around. And I thought about that for a bit. I was like huh you know that's actually genius because if you're someone like me who's easily distracted by like and uh you know just things happening all around you. Sometimes when you're in a beautiful place that is all you want. You want a moment of quiet and peace to reflect and just to experience it yourself. Hey look who it is. They made it. Hola Denmark. You made it. How was the hike? It was steep. A lot of stairs. Okay friends as you can see by these streets behind me I am now back down the mountain again. I actually found an interesting way down. I was just trying to walk down though down the road and then I ended up sort of cutting through this very local neighborhood. Some guy with some chickens. Very cute. I hope those are not his dinner but they were very cute and yeah give you a taste of like the different different lives that are happening side by side in Bogota. You got the tourist attraction next to the thriving quickly developing uh downtown next to La Candelaria with the historic buildings. Next to the guy with his chickens just chilling in the hills probably like his family has for generations and generations. I'm now pretty hungry and I just stumbled upon this place called uh Date Gusto. Am I saying that right? Date Gusto. I don't know but I think it's a Mexican restaurant and it looks cool so I'm gonna I'm gonna check it out. Hola, buenas tardes. it's like if someone mixed an iced tea with orange with a little bit of Pepsi. You guys know what I'm talking about. And look at this massive bowl. Oh my god this thing is heavy. We got three different types of meat in here and uh yeah this is literally like oh it's a lot of food. Anyway here we are back on the streets of Bogota. I look at the interesting architecture directly in front of me. Oh and down below that's the Trans Millenio which is this kind of like rapid bus system that you see all over the city. I haven't had a chance to take it yet. The only transit I've been taking is Uber which I must say is very cheap in this country. Most of the rides I take are like three or four dollars. It's crazy. Oh which just reminded me uh so I think Uber is technically illegal in Colombia at least that's what my first Uber driver told me. Yeah I called an Uber to the airport when I arrived in Bogota and the driver he was messaging me through the app. He's like meet me in parking lot C. And I had all my bags with me and parking lot C was kind of far away so I was thinking like meet you in parking lot C. I don't want to meet you there. Why do I have to do this? But then okay eventually I found the guy and I asked him why he couldn't pick me up at the airport and he said oh Uber is illegal in Colombia. So basically he had to pretend like he was my friend picking me up in one of the parking lots. And something else I'm noticing just now is there's pretty nice public spaces too. I mean obviously a lot of cities have parks but here they just have these little green spaces that are built into the city. They're not exactly parks they're just kind of public plazas and I see a lot of these around Bogota. It is now about 6 p.m. The sun is setting somewhere behind me. As you can see I'm wearing a coat at this point. I started this day in a t-shirt then I moved to a long sleeve. Now I'm wearing a wind jacket. That's just a day in Bogota. It's a day of many weather systems that's for sure. But before this video ended I wanted to take you here to Plaza Bolivar. Is that what it's called? No I apologize it's Bolivar Square. It is kind of a plaza but is it a plaza? Is it a square? Is there any difference? I don't know. The point is we're here. What a place to end the day huh? But while I leave you with some footage of the beautiful architecture that surrounds us I wanted to also tell you a story. So as you can see to my left there's all kinds of people selling things and I actually came here yesterday not for sunset but earlier in the day yesterday and yeah I don't usually buy souvenirs when I'm traveling. You know I get enough stuff in my bag I don't need anything else weighing me down. But I saw something interesting. It was this guy from Venezuela who was selling well first of all he was selling Venezuelan notes. He was also selling these little handbags and stuff that he had made out of the notes. I didn't take a picture. I probably should have asked him for a picture. I was kind of shy but if if you google search you can see pictures of other people doing this and basically why are they doing this? Why are they making handbags out of money? Well the reason is because Venezuela is going through an economic crisis and their money has become so devalued. From what I understand when people buy things in Venezuela with their currency they don't even count it anymore. They weigh it on a scale because that's how much money you need to actually buy things. It's worthless and so this guy is one of many immigrants refugees you could call them from Venezuela who have moved to Colombia and he's selling these bags and stuff out of the money. These are the Venezuelan bills okay so I paid five thousand which is like basically one U.S. dollar just to have these as a souvenir and for that one U.S. dollar he gave me this is a five dollars two thousand five thousand ten thousand twenty thousand and this here is not a hundred this is a hundred thousand and so even a hundred thousand of their currency is essentially worthless because he's able to sell all this to a tourist for basically one U.S. dollar and he's able to make handbags out of bills like this and so I decided to buy that just as a little souvenir and just as a little reminder to be grateful to live in a place where money is worth something where you don't need to weigh your bills to buy food to feed your family where you don't need to flee your country because your money is not buying anything anymore and so today I came back here and I remember the place he was somewhere over there to the left of the uh the cathedral and I thought if I saw him again maybe I would talk to him but uh he's not there today the guy's gone you know now he's just a face amongst millions living in Bogota and there are in fact two million refugees from Venezuela now living in Colombia that's an enormous number for a country of like what 50 million people I think to take in two million refugees that to me speaks to the big heart of the Colombians and it also speaks obviously to the crisis that's facing Venezuela and how intense the situation is so I wanted to end the video just by acknowledging that just by mentioning it because you know there's real lives and real stories happening around you and when you get a glimpse of one of those I think it's worth sharing so and that's it that's all I got for you today the lights of the cathedral have just turned on and the lights of the day are fading into darkness as always I'm Dan from the new travel hope you enjoyed this one and I will see you on the road hey and check it out just as I was walking out of the square I saw this restaurant called La Puerta Falsa it's a famous traditional Colombian restaurant and I just got one of their warm and delicious tamales that I'm gonna devour as soon as I get home now you guys can't make fun of me for having a Mexican bowl on my first Colombian video okay hey guys thanks a lot for making it to the end of the video like most of my videos there are no sponsors on this content so this is made possible by the generous support of people like those names you see floating by my head if you would also like to see your name floating by my head here's a couple ways that you can support even for a couple dollars a month it really means a lot it allows me to keep doing this my dream job of showing people that the world is not as scary as they think as always super grateful for your viewership and I will catch you next time peace