May 30, 2026
So today’s adventure was actually “get the hell out of bogota”.
There’s a town about two hours north called zipaquira, and there you’ll find an old salt mine, and inside that salt mine, deep underground, is a cathedral. Sounded neat to me, so I made that my quest.
How do you get there? Rich people either take a taxi, or a tourist train. Me? Public transit.
Transit that far outside of bogota happens in stages. There’s a bus running from portal norte in bogota to zipaquira and back. So the other stage is getting to portal norte. How do one do that?
Bogota has a rapid transit system called the Transmilenia. I suspect that’s Spanish for “horrible abomination”. This is a transit system that can’t decide if it’s a train or a bus, so some civil engineer fever dreamed a bastard system that takes the worst of both and rolled them together and ran with it.
They’re busses, 2-5 of them chained together like a train, that travel on their own right of way in dedicated lanes, but still have to interact with pedestrians and cross traffic. And the dedicated lanes probably haven’t seen any maintenance since the system was built. Any idea what happens when a 5 bus chain packed so full of people it’s standing room only traveling at high speed hits a super deep pothole? It ain’t pretty.
Also navigating within the system is deeply confusing. I refer everyone to the system map:
What that doesn’t show is some of those lines only run on certain days or certain times, some stations are only open on certain days or certain times.
Based on that map for me to get from where I am to portal norte I head down to the museo del oro station (the closest to me), and take line B74 the whole way there. Well, B74 doesn’t stop at museo del oro on Saturdays. And I didn’t find that out until I was already on the station platform. The only line running through that station on Saturdays is F23. So I figured I’d hop on that and transfer at another station.
Long story short, couldn’t figure out how to do that. Ended up exiting the system At jiminez after ending up there twice and walked to Calle 22. Managed to find a direct line from there to portal norte.
The bus portion of the trip was easy. Bus waits at portal norte and takes you to the bus depot in zipa. From there it’s an easy walk through town.
Town has a beautiful plaza.
Then it’s a hike up a hill to the mine entrance. The tours are guided, in Spanish, but you’re not obliged to stay with your guide, so I promptly ditched the group.
As you descend into the mine there’s several of these alcoves that are just adorned with a simple cross.
Once you get to the lowest level you come to the cathedral.
It was actually really pretty down there.
Also had what could be considered a choir, or a second chapel
The history of it is the miners created a small chapel to pray in before their shift. And over time they just kept enlarging it. Regular church services do happen in there. There were even a few nuns milling about while I was there.
Once you get past the cathedral the place becomes weird. There’s a shopping mall down there. You can get yourself a Starbucks latte, get a massage, buy emerald jewelry, buy the most random tourist crap ever (there was a shop selling Egyptian souvenirs. Why?), etc. the only shop that did make sense to me was selling overpriced salt.
But, up until the shopping mall portion the place was actually pretty neat.
Also had wall carvings in the salt.
And some sort of reflecting pool that took me an absurdly long time to realize was a reflecting pool.
Well worth going.
The return bus was easy to find. Brought me back to the transmilenio. Navigated the system a little better on my return. Still ended up having to figure out complicated transfers, but I at least got back to my part of bogota without just exiting the system and walking to another station.
Anywho. Tomorrow morning I pack, and then it’s back to the airport to fly back to Chicago. Kinda looking forward to going back to home and back to work. But I have enjoyed this month of adventure.
