When I planned this trip through Latin America, I knew even with two months I was only going to be able to see a limited number of countries. Colombia wasn’t going to be one of them. I planned to start in Mexico — there was a lot I still wanted to see from the last time — and I had to end in Argentina. I was also targeting about two weeks in each country, to try and slow down my usual pace of travel.¹ That gave me two more countries. I had been planning to see Chile since 2020, and still had romantic ideas about catching the bus through the mountains from Santiago to Córdoba.² And for the last one I ultimately decided to see Peru.

But as I planned out the trip, I found out most of the cheap flights between Central and South America go through either Bogotá or Medallín. And if I was going to be flying through anyway, it seemed ridiculous not to at least spend a few days. So I basically flipped a coin and chose Bogatá.

I had been very briefly in Colombia before³ so even this short trip represents a much bigger dive into the culture. And I’m not kidding myself into thinking I understand much. But there’s a rich and tragic history which is just bursting through everywhere, from the Palace of Justice⁴ to the corner of Carrera 7 and Calle 14 where Jorge Eliécer Gaitán was assassinated,⁵ to El Museo del Oro.⁶ It’s all of a piece; the violence of the colonial period leaning to the violence of the revolution leading to the violence of civil war, all the way down to the recent past, where paramilitary groups on the right and left turned to drug money to fund their operations.

Colombia’s doing its best to emerge from that sordid history. I stayed with my Russian friend in La Candelaria, the historic center of the city, and it was beautiful and safe and charming. We didn’t do much in the few days we had — took a walking tour through the area, visited the Botero Museum and the Museum of Gold, poked our head in about a dozen churches. That’s okay; I think we both needed a little downtime. And in way, just seeing the normal side of Bogatá is inspiring. That’s the only way to overcome a century of violence; just carrying on with your lives.

I don’t know how fragile the peace in Colombia actually is. There are still terrorist attacks going on near the Venezuelan border.⁷ The history of the world suggests that peace is always more fragile than we’d care to admit. But for all the media attention it gets when it falls apart, we never seem to spend the time affirming the slow, painful work to put it all back together. And we really should.

Half of the trouble of traveling during the Age of Corona is keeping safe — masks and vaccinations and distancing and whatnot. For me, at this point, I feel pretty okay about all that; I’m inoculated up the wazoo and taking reasonable precautions and feel like the risks if I do catch it are minimal. My Russian friend feels much the same way, not least in part because they’ve already caught it twice.

But the other half is the bureaucracy surrounding the Coronavirus. There’s an ever changing array of restrictions on what you need to enter a country and whether you’ll need to get tested before or after flying and if you’ll need to quarantine. Most of this seems pretty reasonable to me. Proof of vaccination isn’t a huge burden, in my experience. But some seem pretty ill-considered.⁸

For my part, the cruise I’m booked on in a month rather suddenly and sensibly decided to require a booster shot. Unfortunately, I have absolutely no evidence whatsoever that I got the booster shot at a walk-in clinic in the UK — the electronic proof requires an NHS number, and they simply didn’t hand out paper proof. I suppose I should have demanded something at the time, although I’m not sure they would have been able to oblige. And so I had to make an appointment with a doctor in Mexico,⁹ get a very special note requesting I get a booster, and then travel to one of the vaccination centers and present this request.¹⁰

It’s been worse for my Russian friend. Russia has only approved the Sputnik V vaccine and has banned all other vaccines from the country. The EU does not recognize the Sputnik V vaccine. So my friend is considered unvaccinated in the EU and hasn’t been able to travel since 2020.¹¹

It is Kafkaesque to discover you cannot leave your country because of a fundamental bureaucratic misalignment, and personally devastating when that misalignment has been more-or-less engineered to score some political points for various regimes you never voted for and do not agree with. We were not explicitly planning to fix this during our travels,¹² but when we arrived in Colombia our host assured us not only was the single-dose J&J vaccine available but it would be trivial to get. And so the first full morning of our trip to Colombia we found ourselves at one of the many walk-in vaccination centers and we got it done.

It’s disheartening, to say the least, to be two years into the pandemic and to still find these kind of badly-thought out policies being thrown up. I don’t like being forced to make medical decisions for bureaucratic reasons. I don’t like blanket policies which don’t reflect any understanding of the real lives people live.¹³ We should contort our bureaucracies to fit our lives, not contort our lives to fit our bureaucracies.

We left Colombia early this morning. We managed to make one of the tightest connections I’ve ever had the misfortune to attempt¹⁴ and landed in Cusco a few hours ago. We’ve got a little more time booked in countries from here on out; four nights just isn’t long enough for Colombia. But I guess it will have to do for now.

Next: Lima (LIM) to São Paulo (GRU)
Prev: Oaxaca (OAX) to Bogotá (BOG)

Footnotes

¹ With, to no one’s surprise, mixed success

² You can apparently sit in the front and watch the sun come up during the drive. I regretfully abandoned the idea of the bus trip, as I think the land border is still shut down.

³ It was a port of call on one of the cruises I took with my father, so I had a couple hours in Cartagena. So it barely counts.

⁴ Site of the 1985 siege

⁵ This triggered the riots in downtown Bogatá known as “El Bogotazo,” which themselves started the period known as “La Violencia” — which serves as the backstory of Encanto.

⁶ Which tells the story of the prehispanic metalworking, primarily gold, and that necessarily tells of the Spanish rush to colonize and exploit the area.

⁷ Although it does seem well-contained to the outlying areas; the cities, the coast, and the mountains remain quite safe.

⁸ I’m still miffed at Norway’s decision to bar everyone without electronic proof of vaccination, knowing that most people vaccinated in the United States can not produce that, through no fault of their own.

⁹ Whose surname, I kid you not, was “Corona.”

¹⁰ And that was a whole thing, let me tell you. First, the vaccine center turned out to be drive-through only. So having walked up to the check-in center, they told me I had to wave someone down and hitch a ride through. I did that, only to get asked out of the car at the check-in center once they realized I didn’t have the correct paperwork. Having explained the situation and gotten the correct paperwork from them, I flagged another car down and was driven up to the people giving the injections, where they decided the paperwork was invalid. I got back out and found a doctor who spoke English and explained the situation, they went to the people giving the injections and argued with them for 15 minutes, we then went down the hill to the check-in center, explained what was going on, reaffirmed they had approved me to get a booster, then rode back up to the people giving the shots where they once again decided I didn’t qualify, at which point I got out of the car and had another round of arguments before they gave me the shot.

At this point I discovered the stamped paper they gave me at the start of the process was my proof of getting the booster, and I could have skipped all of it after that point.

¹¹ The loophole for a while was Croatia — Russians could pretty easily spend a weekend there, get the single-dose vaccine at just about any pharmacy, and score an EU vaccine certificate. Reportedly that option is no longer available.

¹² Not unexpectedly, it’s nearly impossible to get straightforward information about getting vaccinated as a visitor in most of these places. The advice for Americans in Mexico is overwhelmingly to fly to America — which turns out to be what most of the Mexicans who could afford it did as well.

¹³ Why couldn’t you craft a policy that accepts non-electronic proof coupled with a negative PCR test for places where electronic proof isn’t available? Why couldn’t you allow someone someone in with a non-approved vaccine if it was coupled with a negative test and an appointment to get an approved one within a day or two? Would those loopholes in any meaningful way make people less safe?

¹⁴ The 2½ hours we had between flights in Lima turned into 1½ hours when the earlier flight was rescheduled. We landed, booked it off the flight, got through passport control, ran through baggage claim and customs, found our way to the check-in desk and got boarding passes, then ran back to the departure gates, went through security, and arrived at our gate in a half-hour, a full 15 minutes before they started boarding.

We even had time to buy sandwiches before boarding, and wait for them to be heated up.