Let me just say a few things before I retire this evening. First of all, if you've never been at extreme altitudes, it can really surprise you. At various times today, I have been out of breath just sitting still, and have had a headache off and on. These symptoms are said to be consistent with High Altitude Sickness. Apparently, Bogota is the 3rd highest altitude in the world among major cities, at 8678 feet. That's nearly 3500 feet higher than Denver! Adding insult to injury is the fact that cold weather (its about 49 degrees F and rainy) reportedly aggravates these conditions.
The other thing that dogged me today was the incredible traffic. It seemed to go in every direction on every street. To use "go" is quite a poor choice of words because the cars did anything but that. This city has about 10 million people and it seemed like whomever wasn't jammed into a taxi or a bus (many of the doors of the buses were open as folks held on to a rail inside while half hanging outside) owns a vehicle. We had to wait about an hour and a half for our taxi to come, and then drive for about an hour back to the hotel across town. This same taxi is coming for us again at 615am, so I've got to cut this short. More tomorrow about the wonderful park view that I enjoyed while eating my paella dinner.
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