Traveling: I Love You, I Love You Not

Sometimes I really hate traveling.

Traveling is not always glamorous. 

My first day in Bogota was spent trying to get used to the 2600 meter altitude change. 

My second day in Bogota was spent trying to get my camera fixed, which has been broken since we were in San Cristobal de las Casas, Mexico in January. Unfortunately, they thought that cleaning it would fix the problem (despite the fact that I told them the fix it shop in Costa Rica tried cleaning it with no avail). In the process, they broke a lever making the camera always in manual focus mode. Not ideal for candid street photography. 

To make matters even more unpleasant, we’ve switched hostels each night, which pretty much sucks. I won’t even describe the bathroom at the last hostel…

Sometimes I really love traveling. 

My third day in Bogota was filled with the Museo del Oro. We arrived just in time for the free English tour. 

The beautiful gold museum started with just one artifact: a canister for ground limestone to be used with chewing coca leaves.

The central bank of Colombia realized the rich history associated with their growing gold collection and sought out ways to share the history with others, first through putting images of the gold artifacts on their currency and eventually through this extensive gold museum. 

On the tour, I learned all about the symbolism of the artifacts and about shamanism. In another part of the museum, I learned about the techniques for making the gold pieces. It was all fascinating. 

The pinnacle piece in the museum is the gold raft, which symbolizes El Dorado. The people would make sacrifices of precious metals and other things to create balance between the three worlds. To do that, they would dump gold, silver, copper, etc. into lake Guatavita. Unfortunately, that led to a lot of looting of the lake and destruction of a beautiful natural resource. Today lake Guatavita is protected and on the mend.

The museum takes a few hours to see everything, and the entrance fee is good for all day. We spent an hour there in the morning, had lunch, and came back to see the rest in the afternoon. It made for a lovely day. The entrance fee is only 3,000 Colombian Pesos ($1.15 USD). 

Now that we are settled into a decent hostel and are not making more trips to camera repair shops, I’m looking forward to exploring Colombia’s mountain capital for the next few days.