The first day of our small expedition into the Amazon was kayaking. Somehow I thought that by being in a boat I’d manage to stay relatively dry. Not so… as soon as I sat down in the kayak (which was already mostly filled with water) I was soaked. This coupled with the fact that it rained for much of the day (who’d have thought there’d be rain in the Amazon?) made it a thoroughly wet day. But paddling through the rivers that make up the Amazon was cool. But, the really neat parts were the moments when we were going through flooded portions of the jungle and weaving around mangroves. We stopped for lunch with some parrots but for the most part we set a pretty aggressive pace that left me pretty beat by the time we got back.

After a much needed shower we were pretty hungry so naturally we decided to walk to Brazil for lunch. After searching in vain for some pizza we ended up at a Chinese/Peruvian restaurant which was… about as good as it sounds. However, our expedition redeemed itself on the way back with a stop at a place that I think was called the “Legends of Rock” Bar. That’s what we called it anyway. It was a cool place that played American rock music videos. At some point we ended up at some other tiny Leticia bar but after such a long day we all called it a night pretty early.

Finishing touches on some work and then off to the airport this morning. I started out making good time but then my Uber driver took me to the wrong terminal at the airport so I had to get him to fix that. Worth mentioning at this point that Uber is not legal in Colombia. So on the way to the second terminal we got stopped by the police… forever. Started to worry that I might not even make my flight but my limited Spanish was enough for me to confirm my drivers cover story so they finally let us go. From Bogota it’s a two hour flight to the tiny town of Leticia which is the southern most city in Colombia and sits right on the Amazon river. This is actually the intersection of three countries. Across the river is Peru and just a couple of blocks walk from my hotel is Brazil. I stayed at the Decameron Decalodge Ticuna which was nice and thankfully had air conditioning. Our first afternoon we didn’t do much. Settled into the hotel and then had dinner there.

Today the focus was on getting all my work done for both tomorrow and Monday as we are heading out into the Amazon and I didn’t want to be having to worry about finding internet and constantly having my laptop around. I stopped for lunch at a little quesadilla place, Chidas Quesadillas, on the way to the office and then basically powered through work all the way until the evening until I had to head home to pack for our excursion.

It has been brought to my attention that many people have goals for this year on the road of ours. Truth be told I didn’t set out with any goals for the year. I was just looking to fill the gap in excitement created by not working on a Presidential campaign. In early days we were put on the spot on to list some goals and I just tossed out “learn Python.” …so I’ve been working on that, which meant this was another day with my head down trying to figure out how to get the code I was writing to work. The whole day flew by and before I knew it, it was time for dinner. In what is becoming a wee tradition I met my roommate from last month for “date night.” We went to Criterion which I belatedly remembered is on the Latin America Top 50 list. As you’d expect it was excellent. Then after dinner drinks at Apache (since the first two places we tried to go were closed) also a cool rooftop bar worth checking out. …even though it is full of hipster nonsense.

Pretty uneventful day today. I remained completely caught up in this little coding conundrum so after heading over to the office I looked up and the next thing I knew it was nighttime. I hadn’t given any thought to dinner plans so I just walked down to Parque 93 and saw Osaki sushi which I’d heard was good. It was but nothing to write home about out.

Tried to have a productive day today. It’s a holiday back in the U.S. so things were pretty quiet. Which was good because I got consumed reading these books I started. Tried to go to Work&Go but didn’t actually do any work, just consumed their free coffee and kept reading. I was craving Italian so I had dinner at Di Lucca which was a great little spot. There’s a lot of good Italian places in Bogota but so far they’ve all seemed a little… off, to me so they haven’t done much to satisfy that craving.

Continuing the run of early morning tours of things today we went over to a coffee roaster and did a coffee tasting. Despite the multitude of tastings I’ve done in my day (whiskey, wine… food) this was my first coffee tasting. I’d always considered myself pretty up to speed on coffee but I was surprised at how much I didn’t know. Afterwards I ended up at another all day brunch at the Click Clack Hotel. In the evening I started reading this series of books that my friend has been recommending to me for months at that’s basically consumed me now.

Organized events have really been stepped up in the past two months. So, I had an early start today (earlier because I was trying not to lose the wager that I lost) to go on a tour of one of the Colombian flower exporters. Turns out Colombia is the second largest exporter of flowers in the world. Kind of neat to see how that gets done and how these flowers get flown up to the U.S. every day. After that I got bogged down in an annoying work problem that consumed the rest of my day and I just had dinner at this English pub. Which was much better than I thought it’d be.

I worked from this great cafe El Altillo today. As I was sitting in their little… indoor garden area listening to the music which was acoustic U2 I felt like I hadn’t even left The States. Mere moments before I was snarled in Bogota traffic fighting my way up to this cafe. And once I was there it was like being a world away. Listening to U2 in this little Bogota cafe, with it’s French coffee service, was one of those moments that really made me appreciate how small the world is. Back home Colombia seems like a world away. But when you’re here… or in any of the places I’ve visited this year things are so remarkably the same. My life is still sitting in cafes banging away on my laptop. Other folks own and run the cafes that I stop into the world over and their little stores and stands and for the most part everyone goes about their lives just like everyone else does everywhere else in the world.

Got sidetracked planning trips into the Amazon this morning so wasn’t super productive on the work front. Finally made it out of the house after noon and headed over to Work & Go to do some actual work but being too enthused for the Amazon just looked into that some more. Despite having a big dinner planned in the evening and trying to avoid eating I broke down and had lunch at Burger Town and then worked for a while longer. I didn’t sleep well last night so I took the unusual step of laying down for a bit before dinner. Then it was off to Leo for a 16 course or something tasting menu dinner that took over four hours. I don’t recall the exact stats on the hype but this was the best place in Bogota and… 13 or something in Latin America. So, obviously it didn’t disappoint.