Brief aus Bogotá

Wander the streets of sweltering Cartagena, a fortress of a city by the sea on the northern coast of Colombia and you will be taken in by its colourful facades, flower-laden wooden balconies and rooftop patios. The fiery sun bounces off of the freshly painted houses adorned in bright reds, yellows and even blues. The echo of your voice can be heard in the narrow streets where an atmosphere so intimate prevails that the roads give the impression of being alleyways.

And if you look a little closer at the Colombians you might notice that they never stop to dance.

Oh they did dance their fiery, feverishly paced salsa every night, but not JUST at night – although that was a spectacle. The motions of their thighs and breasts were more like muscular gyrations, and their speed of their salsa was acrobatic. But even in the streets during their every-day lives the shifty walks of the Colombians appeared almost choreographed as one step lead into another. They kept a kind of a beat that was noticeable only inadvertently.

But this journey led me to crisscross the country, from the cool capital, to the famed “coffee triangle.” The next stop however was Bogotá, high in Andes mountains, a ...