The Real Bogotá

The true story behind "Bogotá Vacation Gone Wrong." In the fiction, a traveler named Sam gets caught up in a kidnapping at a remote coffee farm in the hills outside Bogotá, Sam isn't the one taken, but doesn't exactly walk away clean either. The kidnapping is the one thing I made up. Almost everything else is real, and the real trip was, if anything, more dangerous than the plot I handed it.

Three Days, Three Disasters

I have taken a lot of trips. Bogotá is the only one that felt like it was personally trying to get rid of me, and it ran through its entire repertoire in about seventy-two hours.

Day one: a political assassination attempt in the city. I arrived, dropped my bags, turned on the news, and discovered I'd landed in the middle of someone else's very bad week.

Day two: an earthquake, strong enough that the hotel was evacuated and I found myself standing on the street at an unreasonable hour with a few hundred strangers, all of us doing the math on how far we were from the building.

Day three, and at this point it started to feel like a dare, I was photographing a handsome colonial church when a robbery attempt unfolded in broad daylight a few steps away. I have the photo to prove it: a serene, sunlit church, taken at the exact moment a crime was happening just outside the frame.

A sensible person reads three omens in three days and flies home. I am not, for these purposes, a sensible person. I read them as material.

I want to be clear about this, because Bogotá is a real city that real people should actually visit: none of it is normal. I appear to be a magnet for incidents, and Bogotá just had the bad luck to be the backdrop for three of them in a row. The city didn’t do any of this to me. It was simply there, being vivid, while I attracted the lightning. Go. It’s one of the most alive places I’ve ever set foot in, and I’d be on a plane back tomorrow.

The Street Artist's Tour (and the Guide Who'd Seen Worse)

Here's the thing the three-disasters opener gets wrong: Bogotá isn't a frightening city. It's a vivid one. Nothing sells that better than its street art, which is everywhere, enormous, and genuinely world-class, the city more or less decriminalized it years ago and the walls have been competing ever since.

I took a walking tour of it, and the most memorable part wasn't a mural. It was the guide. He was Venezuelan, and between the paintings he told me what he'd left behind, the kind of quiet, matter-of-fact stories about corruption and collapse that rearrange your sense of what "a bad week" means. I'd come in rattled by my own three days. By the end of the tour I understood that the darkest material I'd hear in Colombia wasn't about Colombia at all. It was about the country next door, told by a man who'd gotten out.

The Coffee Farm (Where the Story Was Actually Born)

The coffee farm in the story is real. I went.

What the story doesn't tell you is how long it takes to get there. The farm sits out in the hills, and reaching it meant several hours crawling through Bogotá's rush-hour traffic, a slow, grinding, where-are-we-now kind of drive that gives a writer far too much time to think. Somewhere in the second hour, idly, looking out at how remote we were getting and how impossibly far from anything, I had the thought: this would be an excellent place to hide a person. Nobody would ever find them out here.

That idle thought, generated purely by traffic, is the entire story. The kidnapping I invented was really just my brain doing what it does on long drives, turning a logistics problem into a crime. The coffee, for the record, was worth every hour. You taste it where it's grown and you understand, finally, what all the fuss has been about.

A Palate Cleanser: The Fat Mona Lisa

Lest this all sound grim, I also spent a very happy morning at the Botero Museum, home to Fernando Botero's gloriously round people, everyone and everything rendered plump, including his version of the Mona Lisa, who gazes out with the same enigmatic smile and roughly three times the cheeks. I got my picture taken with her. It is, I think, the only photo of my entire Bogotá trip in which nobody is in danger.

The Fruit You've Never Heard Of

I also did a food tour, which in Colombia means being handed fruit after fruit you cannot pronounce and have never seen. The standout was the rambutan, a small red orb covered in soft, hairy spines, like a sea urchin that decided to be friendly, which you peel open to find a sweet, translucent, lychee-ish fruit hiding inside. It looks like something that would hatch and tastes like a country showing off. Bring an empty stomach and abandon your assumptions about what a fruit is allowed to be.

What Didn't Make the Story

Here's the part I never put in the fiction, because the fiction had a kidnapping to attend to and no room for the best day of the trip.

I took a side trip to a salt mine, the vast underground cathedral carved into the rock, cross after cross hewn out of the dark. Deep inside, there's a cross you can stand in front of, lit against the blackness, and someone took a photo of me there that remains one of my favorite pictures of myself ever taken. I look, in it, like a man who was not nearly kidnapped three times that week.

And it was on that tour that I met Adrienne. Travel does this occasionally, hands you a stranger you click with instantly, no runway required, as if you'd simply been friends already and the trip just got around to introducing you. We fell into the easy, unguarded kind of talk you usually only manage with old friends, in our case about the feminist convictions we turned out to share, and somewhere in there a fellow tourist became an actual friend. The dangerous version of Bogotá, the one I turned into a story, has no space for a day like that. The real Bogotá had both, tried to kill me three ways, then handed me a favorite photograph and a lasting friend. Cities, it turns out, contain multitudes.

A Few That Didn't Make the Cut

I shot far more street art than I could ever use, and some of the best never made it anywhere. Here are a few that deserved better than my hard drive.