Day 3 Friday pm - Get on the bus

We book a night-time trip on a chiva, a typical Colombian bus. Essentially this is riding around the city for 2 hours with a live band playing vallenato in an open-air trolley. When you board the chiva, you’re given a bottle of rum, a bottle of coke, a bucket of ice, and a cup. Party time!

The party bus.

We drive through Bocagrande, an area on the water that very much reminds me of South Beach: lots of high-rise apartment buildings with glass, white lobbies and fountains out front. We also go through a residential neighborhood, which is like New Orleans’ Garden District but the houses are painted with brighter colors and have less wrought iron.

We wind up at a discotheque in Getsemani called Mister Babilla. It’s 11 pm when we arrive, and the place looks like an abandoned restaurant. Immediately I think it’s a tourist trap; why else would they have brought us to some lame place? But we order a beer and within an hour the place is exploding, and everyone is salsa dancing.

Shakira, Shakira!

We dance with some people from Venezuela… for about 3 hours. Funny moment was when the DJ played a dance mix of REM’s “Losing My Religion.” While we were dancing our asses off in the club, torrential rain was coming down outside and the city has flooded. The streets look Katrina-esque. We do get a cab, but it’s sort of scary to be driving through so much water.