The Bogota Bike Tour is an adventurous four-hour ride through the city’s stories, museums, parks, street art, graffiti, Parque la Independencia, el Museo Nacional, La Merced, Parque el Renacimiento, the Central Cemetery, La Candelaria, and a great way to meet real people and learn about this beautiful country. The skies were sunny blue and we were lucky to miss the rain all day!

We learned that the Amazon River runs through Colombia, covering 60% of the country in rainforest. Most of the population lives in the mountains that cover the rest of the country, in the foothills of the Andes, in a mild climate known as “perpetual spring.”

Like all countries in North and South America, there is a long history of trade and colonization, mixing indigenous traditions with modern practices. Nobel Prize winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez is Colombian, and while infamous for growing drugs, Colombia is also famous for a vibrant culture of literature, coffee, flowers, strong families, and music.

The climate is also ideal for growing bananas, avocados, vegetables, potatoes, and tropical fruits that flood the green markets with farmers. Our tour guide walked us through the central market for a tasting of fruits we’d never heard of, and we learned that Colombia grows over 80 varieties of passion fruits! Some of them are a little sour…

After an extensive history lesson through the city’s neighborhoods and parks, we stopped for coffee in a small neighborhood where the owners were roasting their own beans in the back room. We saw the green coffee cherries sitting in giant sacks, and smelled the aromas of beans at different stages in the roasting process. Like coffee culture everywhere, the cafe was cosy with chairs and cake displays, and we learned it’s very common for Colombians to put cheese in their coffee. Cheese!! Milk, sugar, cheese, and they put cheese in their hot chocolate too. Did not expect that!

Eli’s glasses took some cool video of our ride through the neighborhoods, and Jake kept a close watch to make sure Mom didn’t get lost. One of my favorite things in life is riding through foreign cities on bike tours with my kids ❤️

At the end of the tour, the group gathered to have a beer and learn how to play “Tejo.” Tejo is a bar game, a bit like cornhole, except that instead of throwing beanbags at a wooden board, you’re throwing heavy pucks of stone into a pile of mud. The mud has little pink “pop-its” full of gunpowder that explode when they’re hit, and the goal is to score points by either nailing the gunpowder or getting your puck inside a target. It was really fun to learn this!

Tejo made us hungry, so after the tour we traced Anthony Bourdain’s footsteps through La Candelaria to find the best tamales. The line was long but totally worth the wait! I’ve never picked through bones in a chicken tamale before, but that’s probably why it tasted so good….

As the sun was going down, we found our way to a gondola taking visitors up the mountain to Monserrate, a beautiful 10,000 foot peak overlooking the city of Bogota. The top is a destination for pilgrims, who hike the long path past the 14 stations of the cross, to a religious site from the 1600’s. The ancient pre-Colombians were astronomers who believed the mountain was magical, because the June sun rises directly behind the peak on the summer solstice.

The modern world has lost so much awareness of the energy in our earth.

Bogota was a fantastic place to celebrate my birthday with my family! A bike trip, a train ride, the first legal beer, the best corn quesadilla of my life so far…. next time, the only thing we’ll do different is double check the tickets to make sure you all have a way to get home.