Colombia Offers Travel Delights

By Maureen Orth

Colombia today constantly goes back and forth in time. On a recent trip, I landed high up in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, the spectacular snowcapped mountain range that falls straight into the Caribbean, and found myself sitting cross-legged with Kogi Indians who live as they did 500 years ago, in a cluster of thatched huts two days’ walk down to the sea. They have always felt at one with nature, but now they say the seasons no longer come when they are supposed to, and it’s hard to know when to plant. After listening to their shamans, I felt they could actually hear the earth breathe.

A few days later, at El Cielo restaurant in Bogotá, I was enveloped in nitrogen dry-ice vapors while chocolate syrup was poured over my hands, followed by sugar sprinkles. The maître d’, who was dressed in jodhpurs and reminded me of a dominatrix, told me that I could lick it off or rinse in the white finger bowl presented for my “chocoterapia”—step three in an eight-step fusion menu produced by a team of chefs, all under 30 (some even in their teens) and who dress in what look like hazmat suits. The stainless-steel and Italian marble kitchen is called “the laboratory.”

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