I did manage to make it to the hotel, I park the truck and head inside around 5am and ask the VERY German looking woman, who speaks pretty much just Spanish-Guarani if there’s any chance I could check in to my room ten hours early.

“No problemo, di nada!” OMG, I could kiss her.

I’m staying in a huge old Euro-regal hotel, it’s old and fancy and interesting…….. and supposedly Hitler is buried in a tomb underneath it.

Not kidding, it’s a thing. I am also the only guest, and the place is huge.

If you read the self-published history of this hotel there is a screamingly conspicuous gap in the story, apparently from 1945 t0 1970 absolutely nothing happened.

Any amount of travel or interest in Paraguay is guaranteed to lead to Nazi’s sooner or later. After WWII, when thousands of Nazi’s escaped to South America they mostly tried to blend in and disappear. Except for the ones in Paraguay, here they took over the entire country and ruled it as a Nazi paradise for far longer than they did in Germany.

Sounds crazy, right, it’s 100% true. The second longest dictatorship in the 20th century, after North Korea, is the Stroessner rule of Paraguay, that the Nazi’s put in place. You just never heard about it because the world chose to look the other way.

My hotel was one of the buildings first confiscated by the Nazi’s, they shot everyone and moved in. Mengele stayed here, as did Stroesser, and Goebbels, all the monsters. They knew Paraguay had no weapons and no friends, no one cared at all.

A 4wd vehicle is pretty mandatory if you’re planning on straying far from Asuncion.

Picking up my rental 4×4 in the airport…

1. Paraguayan roads are famously awful, there’s multiple Youtube docs about this.
2. I haven’t driven a manual transmission in years.
3. It’s 4am, I haven’t slept. I am so tired I am unsteady.
4. I’ve been sick for a week and am far from 100%.
5. It’s a torrential downpour outside.
6. It’s pitch black outside.
7. I’ve spent pretty much zero time ever driving a diesel 4×4.
8. Asuncion has basically no traffic lights and few street lights.
9. I don’t see all that well.
10. Since the transplants I really don’t see all that well at night.

The car rental agent is extremely nice but has left me standing alone, pondering my life choices, in a parking lot, at 4:30am, in a drenching downpour, keys in my hand, after relaying a gigantic list of instructions to me entirely in the local mix of Spanish and Guarani.

I have no idea what I am doing.

While boarding my flight from Bogota, Colombia to Asuncion, Paraguay the conversation went like this (factor in a bit of language barrier as well)

Gate Agent: You have proof of COVID vaccination?

Me: Yes. (I show her)

Gate Agent: You have proof of Yellow Fever vaccination?

Me: Yes. (I show her)

Gate Agent: This is a one way ticket, where is your ticket out of Paraguay?

Me: I don’t have one.

Gate Agent: Well, when are you leaving Paraguay?

Me: I have no idea.

Gate Agent: You need to show me proof on onward travel…

Me: But I don’t have any…

At this point she tells me to stand aside and they board the rest of the flight. Then a conference starts among airline staff. Lots of pointing at me and talking in Spanish.

Gate Agent: We can’t let you board without proof you will leave Paraguay.

Me: Are you certain? I have been planning this trip for a very long time and have never come across any mention anywhere of Paraguay having such a requirement.

Gate Agent: Yes, you absolutely need proof of forward travel.

Me: Does ANYTHING saying I’m leaving Paraguay count?

Gate Agent: Of course.

So now…. with a plane full of people literally waiting… I frantically use my phone to buy a random bus ticket online, for $10, taking me from Asuncion to the Argentine border… that I will never use.

Me: Will this work?

Gate Agent: Of course, now please hurry and board.

The levels of pointless here… I just cannot….

P.S. After landing in Asuncion I asked the border control agent if proof of forward travel is required, he said no, and seemed to have zero idea what I was talking about.

On my way home to pack for the airport I realized I had enough time to grab a quick drink at Huerta, a bar that had been on my list for a long time and that I assumed I wouldn’t get to visit once I got sick.

I’m so incredibly happy I popped in. I was going to just grab a quick drink to cross Huerta off my list and get home to pack. However as soon as I sat down the bartender connected me with the staff member with the best English, Alejandro, and we started discussing cocktails which lead to a lot of other topics.

They showed me multiple local Colombian liquors and how they use them, they poured me taster after taster and gave me samples of the local fruits they use.

It’s absolutely exhilarating to hit a topic you nerd about with new people who are the same.

At once point Alejandro was explaining the passionfruit family and how they use them and he excused himself to grab a missing type of passionfruit. After a few minutes I asked the bartender where he had gone, she smiled and pointed across the street to the market.

Alejandro came back with a bunch more local fruit to try and we discussed cocktail culture in Bogota and in Vancouver, when I said I had just been in Mexico City he vanished again and came back with a different bartender. AND I TOTALLY KNEW THIS BARTENDER! I asked her if I know her, she told me she knew me when I walked in… I AM NOT KIDDING.

Turns out she is the owner of Las Brujas, one of the best bars in Mexico City, I had spent a couple nights there and apparently made an impression. She said she was in Bogota working at Huerta as a bartender exchange with her bar in Mexico City.

EVERYONE’S BRAINS MELTED! The smallest of small worlds.

I hung out with everyone at the bar until it was cutting it close for my flight and said goodbye and asked for the bill. The bill came and the only thing on it was my original cocktail from when I first arrived.

“Customer service” is not even the right term for whatever this interaction was. It was honestly just energetic, nerdy, joy.

My latest working theory for getting so sick is the altitude in Bogota exacerbated whatever knocked me into bed for 3 days. Bogota is between 8500 and 9500 feet up, making it the highest city I’ve been to. In any case I woke up this morning feeling about 75% better and decided to pack as much into my last half day as I could.

Not feels better than realizing you feel better.

I learned when I arrived that Google’s understanding of the high speed bus system in Bogota, the TransMilenio, was pretty much entirely bunk. So I had to trip plan using actually maps and route guides and pens and papers. I’d been using Uber up to now but for a transit nerd Uber really feels like kissing your sister, sure it gets you where you need to be but you just don’t feel quite right about it.

The high speed bus system, in one easy to read layout…. sure

I bused downtown and the walked to a local historic breakfast place for the Colombian version of tamales. Everything was awesome but yet again the latin American concept of customer service was loud and clear. For a Canadian it really does feel like they hope you choke and die on their lovely food.

I wandered aimlessly after breakfast eventually getting back to the TransMilenio bus and riding another hour south to the main favela, as this is where the new gondola transit line is, similar to Mexico City just scaled down quite a bit.

I rode to the very top station and wandered around a very different version of Bogota than I’d seen before. Eventually I got a lemonade (here this seems to mean lime, sugar and coconut water) and sat on a curb for half an hour, just watching the neighborhood rotate. As in Mexico City I felt perfectly safe and unthreatened. Some kids were eyeing me up so I ordered a few more lemonades for them and some chips for us to toss to the street dogs. I cannot express my joy.

I’ve found the people here more outgoing and less hesitant than a lot of people in Mexico, twice during this excursion women came up and started conversations, asking lots of questions, I don’t think this has ever happened to me in Mexico.

One of the women asked if we could share a gondola on the way down, immediately my spidey sense started looking for risk or scam potential but it was pretty clear she was just enjoying talking.

We talked until we got down the cable line and took our separate buses. She gave me a suggestion for lunch so I made my way that direction.

After lunch I started heading back north to where I’m staying to start packing up, I need to be at the airport around 6pm.

UPDATE: I have been informed this is a tamarillo, a member of the nightshade family native to Colombia.

Put up your hand if you are still too sick to get out of bed. (my hand is up)

NOSE – Who knows, I’m too sick to smell. It smells like fruit.

TASTE – Could taste like pumpkin pie for all I can tell, I can’t even breathe. I get notes of guava and papaya and a definite taste of tomato.

DOES IT GO WITH TAJIN – No idea, it’s unheard of in Colombia.

IS IT GOOD – Yup! I’d love to try it again once I can taste again.

I’m getting sicker by the hour so dragging myself out of bed to grab a couple burgers is pretty much all I’m going to accomplish today.

From what I’ve seen so far about 10% of Bogota restaurants are Colombian food, the rest are pretty evenly split among Italian, Mexican and burger places. Burgers are absolutely everywhere here.

For fast food you will always find the Colombian fast food chain “El Corral” in among the KFC and McDonald’s locations, it’s the pride of the nation.

I meant to just grab a burger from El Corral tonight but after I walked in and ordered I looked around and realized I wasn’t actually IN the El Corral, I was instead in the knock-off burger place, “El Burger”, next door. Oops.

I got my imitation burger to go and went next door to also grab the real thing. According to the fates this can mean only one thing…

BOGOTA BURGER SHOWDOWN

CRITERIA	EL BURGER	EL CORRAL	WINNER
BUN	Solid, slightly brioche style	Safeway meets Burger King, meh	EL BURGER
TOPPINGS	Really nice pickles	Awesome fried onions	TIE
BACON	It’s bacon	Interesting, the bacon is sorta shredded, tastes good too	EL CORRAL
CHEESE	Orange, plastic	MOAR orange, MOAR plastic	EL BURGER
PATTY	Not bad at all, nice sauce too	Burger King, dry, really dry	EL BURGER
COST	About half as much as El Corral	About twice as much as El Burger	EL BURGER
OVERALL	Like a Romer’s burger meets a Wendy’s burger, quite good	Honestly just a slightly better tasting, but dry, Whopper	EL BURGER

BOGOTA DRINK REVIEW #1 – COLA & POLA

FUN FACT: I’ve come down with an awful cold and am wasting my Bogota time in bed feeling awful.

NOSE: This smells like beer…. and bubble gum??? Is this alcohol? I picked this up at the grocery store near where I am staying, no clue what this is.

FUN FACT 2: Apparently ‘Cola & Pola’ is a 50/50 mix of beer and “Kola Champagne”.

FUN FACT 3: Apparently “Kola Champagne” is a sort of cream soda with an additional bubble-gum like flavour, no cola.

TASTE: Soooo… this is half beer… half bubble-gum/vanilla soda….

IS IT GOOD: Are you on crack? It’s beer and bubble-gum, it’s literally a joke from the Simpsons. It’s awful.

2/10: Seriously, google “Simpson’s Skittle-Brau”.

After six weeks in Mexican heat the Vancouver-like climate of Bogota feels absolutely wonderful, cool air, cloud cover, grass, trees, it’s heavenly. I wandered pointlessly all day and will do the same tomorrow.

I started a draft of this post a couple weeks back, at that time I wasn’t all that enthralled with Oaxaca. I was certainly having fun but as of then I hadn’t seen any reason to return. It’s the end of my trip now and rereading what I wrote two weeks ago, and rewriting to reflect a newer and more holistic reality, is kinda trippy.

In the past couple weeks the city and I have finally melted together somewhat. It’s still not quite what I expected, a lot more tourists and a lot more tourist focused than I expected. I would guess I arrived about 10 years too late maybe 20. In one of my favourite books the main character travels to Oaxaca in 1984 to try and get his ex brother-in-law out of cartel controlled jail. The way that Oaxaca sounds is what I was looking for. The fat German tourists with their socks and sandals he describes are still present 40 years later, I just fear they’re me.

I’d still love to come back for longer though. It took time to start finding what I was looking for and I really feel I was just starting to get it towards the end. I really love the feeling of starting to add this donut shop, that taco place, the bar behind the alley wall, to my quiver of local knowledge, it’s a wonderful feeling of a particular kind of learning experience.

The centre of Oaxaca City is basically divided into two areas, northeast of the highway is Reforma, the newer part of the city core, think wide streets and nice sidewalks, in a month staying here I never got a chance to visit Reforma even once, next time though.

A 25 minute walk southwest of Reforma, south of the highway, is Centro, the old city centre, the UNESCO Heritage site, etc, where we stayed.

Centro is situated around the zocalo (central square). North of the zocalo is the historic, pretty, clean, touristy area, where we stayed for the first three weeks. South of the zocalo is the market area, more local, rougher around the edges, more lived in, we moved here for the last week and a bit.

The city, especially the historic area north of the zocalo, is the first place I’ve spent significant time where it’s clear from most interactions you’re not a person but a tourist, at least until you put in some work to break through that. The old city feels somewhat sanitized and artificial. I certainly did not have a bad time staying here, but what was pushed aside to make room for tourists is probably what’s missing for me (and yes, I realize I am just another tourist too). Locals are less than thrilled by this situation as well. I understand nothing about the economic impacts of a city becoming a tourism destination at all, and I also understand I’m part of the problem but at the same time it’s a reminder of reality to be hanging out in a city full of graffiti telling me to go home. There is a tent city near the zocalo that stretches a few blocks, we spent some time there, translating the protest signs and at least making an attempt to understand how the recent rapid changes to Oaxaca City are affecting people.

The old city, while undoubtedly beautiful, with street after street of old Spanish block construction, felt oppressive to me on some level. The endless walls and complete absence of greenspace make a lot of the streets in the area a concentration of heat and noise and exhaust fumes. Hiking through these gauntlets just to pass shop after shop of tourist focused items I have zero interest in, to get to tourist focused restaurants that were almost never as good as they had been hyped to be, left me feeling a bit woozy.

I think a certain type of person is going to be most happy staying in Reforma and a certain type is going to be most happy staying in the old city north of the zocalo but we eventually figured out we were neither of these people and we moved to a new place further south, a block south of the central market. Within hours we realized swapping cocktail bars and jewelry stores for tire shops and chocolate processors was more what we were looking for.

The location change also helped the food situation. One of the main reasons for planning this extended stay in Oaxaca had been years of hearing about the amazing food culture in Oaxaca. While we were certainly able to find good food eventually, especially after moving away from the tourist areas, the Oaxacan cuisine was quite different from what we had expected, either that or we got extremely unlucky over and over with restaurant picks. I had a list of must-try restaurants in the old city and we tried them night after night for the first while, coming away disappointed every time, the restaurants look great, the food looks great, but when you actually eat it the realization that it’s quite mediocre, and expensive, hit us again and again. After a while it sorta started to feel like a joke was being played on the dumb tourists.

Some dishes were not great, some were pretty good, none were worth the money when compared to what you could get in the street or the market. On our last night in Oaxaca I decided to give one last try to the local fancy dining scene, I did a ton of research, found a place that seemed more than just an Instagram filter and we went, it was quite good, I’d say B+ overall but it still had the typical ice cold Mexican service and the cost was, to me, way out of line, we shared two appetizers and one entree plus cocktails and the meal came to $12o Canadian, I just don’t see why anyone would pick this over the better tasting four course lunch in the market for $7.50 Canadian.

Eventually we gave up on all but a couple restaurants and spent more time in the market food stalls and around street carts. Even here however there was much more mediocre food than anything notable. After a month I have a good list of good foods but after coming from Mexico City I still found the Oaxacan food experience quite surprising, and really disappointing.

The bar scene in the old city mirrors the restaurants, the area is packed with interesting looking cocktail bars, often with lovely rooftop patios, but once you spend some time in a few and scratch the surface a bit you realize the drinks are really not very good, nor is the service and most of the bars feel like they were assembled with parts ordered from the same “build your own rooftop cocktail bar” catalog. Not terrible but pretty soulless. A perfect example is the seating in these bars, most of these bars feature consistently bafflingly uncomfortable seating, forcing you to pretzel yourself to sit, to me this indicates an understanding that clientele will visit once or maybe twice ever, leading to an apathetic feeling all around.

As you move further south the cocktail bars are slowly replaced with saloons, which were honestly the most consistently interesting piece of local culture I found. Utterly honest and unpretentious beer halls, frequented mostly by locals, a lot of fun and good times. We ended up familiar with half a dozen of these, where the undefinable feeling of authenticity somehow comes through.

At our favourite saloon the bartender Rene, when I mentioned my shock at being served mediocre margaritas at so many of these lovely looking cocktail bars, just nodded silently and pulled out a dusty shaker, I had no idea he even did cocktails, he proceeded to make a margarita that absolutely shamed every one from every fancy bar in the tourist areas.

Every time I leave a new place I invariably come away with the feeling I was juuuust starting to get it, to understand a few things. This time in Oaxaca is the longest chunk of time I’ve ever spent in one place other than home and the feeling of juuuuust starting to get it is no different than while leaving any new place after 3-4 days.