Bogota, a city of contrasts

You know you’re somewhere unusual when the bathroom in your hotel offers, along with a shower cap, razor and vanity kit, some condoms. The people you meet are speaking English, French and Italian as if they’ve just stepped out of a conference room in Paris with Umberto Eco, and the light is picking out the red-brick apartment blocks along the thickly forested hillside that guards the city as if New Mexico was paying a house-call on Rio. The first question you’re asked by your local, furiously intellectual host is, “What grieves you most about the state of the world?”

The first time I’d visited Bogotá, in 1975, as a teenager, the blue-black clouds that seem to hover perpetually over the city were perhaps in part a reflection of my own clouds of ignorance. A schoolfriend and I had found a listing in the terse South American Handbook for improbably cheap lodgings and had not known enough Spanish to understand what the cab driver meant when he leered at us, “Muchachas!” Being good products of English boarding school, we had spent three days in the Hotel Picasso – a dive on an unlit street surrounded by unpaved alleyways – before we realised that the other patrons were all scantily-clad, surprisingly amenable young women. They, in turn, were astonished to find 18-year-old boys who knew so little about the birds and the bees.

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