Most recently, I traveled about 201 miles to El Eje Cafetero, the coffee zone of Colombia, to visit various cities like Salento, where I hiked Cocora Valley; Pereira, where I saw the only giraffe in Colombia at the Ukumari Zoo; and Santa Rosa de Cabal, where I enjoyed swimming in natural hot springs.
This week, I took four paid cars, and I walked everywhere else. While they have the typical yellow taxis here, it is recommended to avoid them as much as possible because sometimes tourists and foreigners get taken advantage of and overcharged. Instead, I prefer to use services like Uber, DiDi or InDrive. Uber is popular in the U.S. and usually is the most expensive option here, but drivers accept trips more quickly, so sometimes convenience is costly. DiDi is like Colombian Uber, but its drivers prefer that you pay in cash and can take longer to accept your trip request. DiDi is cool, though, because you can request a DiDi moto (motorcycle), which is almost always half the price of a full-sized car. In addition to Uber and Didi, they also have an app called InDrive, where you can negotiate prices with potential drivers instead of agreeing to a fixed rate. This week, I took two Ubers to and from the airport to pick up my visiting friend and two more to go to the botanical gardens with him. The rest of the week, we just walked everywhere because everything we wanted to do was pretty close. If we had wanted to venture further across Bogotá, we would have used my TuLlave ("YourKey"), the card I load money onto to pay for the bus. You can use TuLlave for TransMilenio or SITP, the two bus systems in Bogotá.
