Art new and old

We arrived in Bogotá safely, having had a very nice lift with an electronic engineer who had just taken over his grandfather's small farm and was full of really interesting chat.  We also got to try lots more Colombian food like, a chilled oatmeal yoghurt drink called avena fria, delicious broth-like soups and Aguapanela, a hot sugar drink which did indeed come with a lump of cheese to go in it.  We got into the city, eventually got to our host's and promptly fell asleep.

The proper exploration of the city began on Monday.  Unfortunately, Monday is the day most of the museums are closed.  We did manage to get into the Donacion Botero, a large collection of works by and belonging to the artist whose sculptures we found in Medellin.  We quite liked them, the majority being big, chunky, lively figures like this version of the Mona Lisa after a few more empañadas

With much of the museums we had come to see shut, we just wandered around enjoying the city, both the old centre and some of the newer parts.  There was a lot more street art and graffiti than anywhere we've seen since Mexico and quite a few slogans and remains of paint-bombs on almost every government building.  Some of the street art was pretty impressive

We also had a really amazing lunch of Ajiaco, for surprisingly little money, given how stuffed we were at the end of it.

While there we explored a few areas of the city (though in a city of more than 8m people, it would take a lot longer to see it all), spent time in the Gold Museum, which has a large collection of Pre-Columbian metalwork and artifacts, and went out for drinks a couple of times with our host, who was a bastion of knowledge on Colombian Metal music.

It is our experience that there are an awful lot of police and army present all the time here.  We've been asked for documents a few times, just sitting in a park or on a bus.  And everywhere we've hitched there has been army and police checkpoints, staffed by teenage, bored-looking people, who sometimes just seem to require a thumbs-up to check everything is alright.

Though the distances aren't very large, the fact they cross over enormous mountains made hitch-hiking not the easiest we've had it.  And while we are enjoying Colombia in many ways, we have encountered some problems.  The hitching has also been complicated by people not being particularly keen to pick us up compared to parts of Central America.  People who have picked us up have explained that the recent history of the country explains this hesitancy, which we totally understand and can appreciate.  The far graver problem has been the lack of cheap beans in supermarkets.  Let us explain.  Ever since our first visit to Fred Meyer supermarket in Fairbanks, Alaska, tinned beans have been the mainstay of our hitching road food.  In Canada they came with maple syrup (whether you wanted them to or not), in the States it was tricky to find them without added bacon fat, in Mexico and Central America they switched to refried red or black beans, but all the way through we've pretty much been on a bean heavy diet.  Beans exist in Colombia, but not in any super-cheap and easy form.  We're experimenting with other tins, but it's just not quite the same.

We got some buses on Thursday to escape the urban sprawl of Bogotá and started hitching south.  Yesterday we arrived in San Agustín, via some amazing views of the Magdalena River, which runs almost the whole length of the country and featured heavily in some Gabriel Garcia Márquez books we read recently (we're somewhat underwhelmed by them to be honest, mostly about the concerns of old white men and their difficult bowels)

San Agustín is famous for its Pre-Columbian ruins and sculptures.  We found a nice camping site and today explored the biggest site in the area.

They're completely different to anything we saw in Central America.  This should be obvious, since we are thousands of miles away, but it can be easy to conflate everything called Pre-Columbian into one.  Very little seems to be known about the people who made these sculptures, you can tell because all the information pretty much describes what you can see in front of one, which is an archaeologist's way of not admitting they don't really know.  But they are still amazing to see and we can make up our own interpretations.

Someone who tried to sell us a guided tour did try to say that the statues show clear evidence of contact and cultural exchange with India and Egypt.  It's not that this is impossible and obviously we're not experts but, they didn't really.  The one supposed to be an elephant (only according to this one guide) could just as easily have been a javelina or ant-eater with added fangs (and they were big into fangs the sculptors were).  It just seemed to be one of these theories that tries to make history more "exciting" and that we came across in a few places in Mexico and probably will again in Peru.  It's never enough to appreciate what we're sure of and that ancient civilisations really did, we have to imbue them with magical powers, 21st century knowledge, and ideally have it all master-minded by a race of white people from Antarctica (true conspiracy theory).

Tomorrow we set off on a wiggly route to Ecuador, hopefully they have beans.