My 325th and one and only Pinmapple pin in Colombia

Twelve years ago I went Latin America on a business trip. It was my first time in the region, and I went to Brazil and Colombia. In my quest to pin as many countries to my Pinmapple map as possible, I posted about Brazil a few years ago, but I never got round to post about Bogota as I only have a few photos which are not very high quality. Most important of all, I had no idea where I went, until I came across a post by @sofiaquino98 a while ago.

Turns out I was at Monserrate Hill, and before you wonder, the low quality image is a combination of the foggy weather and it really being low quality because of the crappy camera I had back then.

Monserrate Hill

Although called a hill, Monserrate Hill is actually 3152 meters above sea level. That's really high, especially by UK standards where our tallest mountain is only 1345 meters above sea level. I have very little memory of how I got there, my colleagues from the local office probably came to pick us up (my self and my two other colleagues from UK) from the hotel. I remember back in those days, Bogota was still quite an unsafe place, and we were told not to go out on our own. I don't know if things have improved now.

In fact the week when I was there, one of the top executives from our client was robbed at home and he had to go into hiding with his family. We had to cancel our meeting with him. I'm not sure if this was a one off incidence, whether it had anything to do with his company (they're a major global distillery company), whether wealthy top business executives regularly get robbed at home, or whether he was involved in some shady business. I was told drug cartels was a big problem in Bogota hence it being quite dangerous. By the way, if there are any Colombians reading this, please tell me if I'm over reacting. I'm only going by what my local Bogota colleagues told me.

Anyway, I digressed. I vaguely remember taking the cable car up the mountain, and these photos certainly jogged my memory. I can't remember if I took this going up or coming down. This is probably one of the, if not the steepest cable car I remember going on.

According to the official website, the ascend from the base to the top of the hill is 820 meters and takes 4 minutes in the cable car. Here's the view as we leave (or approach?) the base.

And the view as we are further up the mountain, the scenery is actually quite amazing.

And we finaly get to the top of Monserrate Hill.

During my two weeks stay in Brazil and Colombia, the weather was always foggy when I got to the top of the mountains. It was like that when I went to the Sugarloaf summit and Corcovado to see Christ the Redeemer at Rio de Janeiro the previous week, and now it was also foggy at Monserrate Hill. Can anyone from Rio and Bogota tell me if I was just unlucky?

There's a church at the top of the hill and I remembered we walked around for a while. The foggy weather was a bit of a disappointment otherwise I'm sure the view of Bogota would have been quite spectacular.

In the evening we were taken to dinner at a really nice restaurant that was decorated like a toy shop. It was really cute. One of the ladies bought along their two beautiful girls that day and they were such darlings, so well behaved. Our dinner turned into a beauty session when the younger one let me plait her beautiful blond hair 😊

And finally to round of our evening, we stopped by some sort of layby for a spot of night view of Bogota city. This must be a popular site as there were many cars here. And I can understand why. Although I have only met all these Colombian's that one time only, they have cemented a spot in my travels around the world, and made it to my 325th one and only Pinmapple pin for Colombia.

You can checkout all my travel post on the Pinmapple here or click on Mr Pinmapple below