Bogota Blogger

One of the greatest things about this city, in my humble opinion, is the Ciclovia. This is the closing of several major artieries all throughout town to trafiic, and the streets are taken over by bicyclists, rollerbladers, runners and walkers. Almost 70 miles worth of roads are closed overall, and it happens every Sunday and every holiday from 7:00AM till 2:00PM. This is so cool. All sizes and types of people get out on the roads, mostly on bicycles, and bike repair guys set up every few blocks to help folks out with air, repairs, whatever. Volunteers who I’m told are mostly college students work at the intersections to let cars pass across the Ciclovia streets.

You can get all over town following the Ciclovia routes, and at certain places (7 or 8, I think, throughout the city) stages are set up and there are mass aerobics classes. For some reason it seems that the weather is almost always good on Sunday mornings(almost, I said–I once got caught 5 miles from home on my bike in a huge downpour). To be on major streets that are quiet and where people are out having fun gives a whole different feel to the city. Like lots of South American cities, Bogota has a pretty serious pollution problem, especially during rush hour, so the Ciclovia is a great relief from that.

There are also, as part of this program, something like 8 parks around town where the city sets up stages and sponsors huge group aerobics  classes.  They’s put a couple leaders up on the stage and then a few hundred people of all shapes and sizes join in and do the dancercize.  One of these stages is at the park on Septima near Calle 38, and since Septima is my major ciclovia route, I normally stop by to hang out for a while.

For more of a challenge, really serious riders like to hit La Calera on Sundays. This is a section of the city that is basically straight up the mountain, right about calle 84 or so. There are a lot of restaurants and night clubs all along the road, because of the views from there, but on SUnday there will be a few hundred cyclists pedalling up and down the mountain, maybe stopping for a juice or beer at one of the roadside restaurants.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 12th, 2007 at 12:00 am and is filed under Transportaion, Bicycling Information. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.