Tag: travel

Breaking Borders

February 4, 2026

Bogota, Colombia

First impressions can be misleading. I hated Bogota when I first arrived here four days ago. But the capital city of Colombia is slowly working its charm upon me. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the people here are winning me over.

The taxi ride from the airport to the city center on a dreary early Sunday morning took me through shabby, rundown, dirty, graffiti-covered buildings and desolate streets. It occurred to me that I had made a big mistake in visiting another Latin American city marred by corruption and incompetence. “Oh great,” I thought, “Another giant sprawling Third World slum.”

But my destination was a hostel in La Candelaria, the historic center of the city with Spanish colonial architecture. Crumbling buildings, to be sure, but hey – they’re atmospheric, colorful, and they have tile roofs. The plazas and parks, the wildly gaudy wall murals, the gorgeous old cathedrals, the museums and art galleries, the restaurants, and streets thronged with people serenaded by music and entertained by street performers- this city is alive with energy and friendly, unpretentious people. Splashes of color, tropical fruit vendors (Colombia is just north of the equator), flower stands, and art everywhere. A working class urban garden district.

Yet this neighborhood in a city of eight million people high in the Andes has known its share of violence. The 16th century Spanish conquest of the indigenous cultures was brutal, and the 19th century Colombian war for independence from Spain, led by Simon Bolivar, was bloody. The 1948 civil war between left wing and right wing political factions destroyed much of Bogotá’s city center, and the latter part of the 20th century was marred by drug violence and gang warfare. Tourism took a nosedive from the 1980’s to the early 2000’s. But now La Candelaria is enjoying a resurgence in tourism.

As gratifying as La Candelaria has been so far, I wanted to step out of the tourist bubble and explore the darker side of Bogota. So yesterday, joined by Jake and Allie, young Canadians and fellow hostel guests, I signed up for a tour of the nearby hillside neighborhood Barrio Egipto. Until recently this barrio was a notorious no-go zone because of its gang turf battles and robberies of anyone foolish enough to venture near it. Named after its Catholic church, Our Lady of Egypt (a reference to the Virgin Mary’s escape to Egypt with Joseph and the infant Jesus), this barrio was the antithesis of the lives of Jesus and Mary.

According to one website, this hillside neighborhood was coveted by developers and their city government accomplices, so those predators deliberately removed a kindergarten, school, and hospital from Barrio Egipto and put an expressway through it, hoping that the locals would move out. Instead, the people stayed in their broken community, and gangs flourished. But in 2016 ex-gang members learned about community-based tourism and decided to use their gang stories as well as street art to open their impoverished community to the wider world to attract visitors from elsewhere in Bogota and Colombia and from other countries. In other words, they replaced crime with tourism as a source of income.

My companions Jake and Allie and I were guided by Harold (29), Junior (21), and later Andres (48), all retired members of the Décima 10 (Tenth Street) Gang. Their tour operation is called Breaking Borders, a reference to transcending the invisible walls between the more prosperous La Candelaria neighborhood and its next door district Barrio Egipto, as well as overcoming the fear and mistrust of the other three gangs in Egipto.

Although most of the crime and violence has been stopped in Egipto, Harold warned us to stay with him during our tour of his gang’s territory, because it’s still not safe for him or us to go into the turf of the other three gangs. As long as we were guided by him, Junior, and Andres, we were protected, and indeed Jake, Allie, and I all felt secure and relaxed during our sojourn in the part of Egipto we were able to see.

Our guides showed us their knife and bullet scars (Andres alone has 11 bullet scars) and told us of their violent crimes and their time spent in prison. They used to rob tourists and students from a nearby university and shoot rival gang members over territorial disputes and for revenge. But they’ve all lost family members and friends to the gang feuds, so they are helping the boys in their barrio to find alternatives to their lives of crime. They also showed us the colorful wall murals that tell the stories of their neighborhood.

With the help of Leona (20), a volunteer from Hamburg, Germany, who speaks fluent English and Spanish, Harold and Andres expressed their frustration that the city of Bogota neglects them, and that there are no schools, medical facilities, or jobs in Egipto. But Leona volunteers for the Buena Semilla (Good Seed) Foundation, a Christian organization that is providing some limited job skills training, education, nutrition, gardening, recreation, music, art, and most of all, hope to the children and youth of all four gang territories of Egipto.

And Harold and Andres told us that after they approached the nearby university ten years ago and offered to stop robbing their students in exchange for the university’s support, the university now offers Egipto residents informal classes in tourism, leading not to official tour guide certification but rather to “territorial companion” designations.

So although Andres acknowledged that he and his fellow Breaking Borders guides have not received any formal education, they have earned unofficial degrees from the University of the Reality of Life Experience as they transmit to their children their lessons learned from being gangsters and ex convicts.

As we walked among the ramshackle hillside homes and watched the boys playing ball and the little girls hugging their mentor Leona, we three tourists were touched by the warmth and humanity of the children, the honesty and courage of our guides from the school of hard knocks, and the compassion of volunteer Leona as together they attempt to accomplish a transformation of their community.

Splendor and Shadow in the Range of Light

May 19, 2025

Everyone needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and cheer and give strength to the body and soul alike. John Muir

When I headed to Yosemite National Park a couple of weeks ago, I expected spectacular scenery and strenuous hiking. I found both. But I also encountered something else that I did not anticipate: small-minded Sierra Club virtue signaling.

During my weeklong sojourn in the land of sheer granite cliffs, gushing waterfalls, and massive sequoia redwoods, my body was challenged by steep mountain trails and my spirit was lifted by roaring river rapids and plunging cascades of frothing white water drama. But my patience was tested by crowds of fellow visitors and by my own judgmental condemnation of judgmental environmentalists.

Yosemite is, unofficially, the first national park in the world, set aside for preservation in 1864 by the U.S. Congress and President Abraham Lincoln. Many others have contributed to its protection, including President Teddy Roosevelt, John Muir, and a friend of Muir’s named Joseph LeConte. John Muir founded the Sierra Club in 1892 and Joseph LeConte was an early director of it, so in 1903 the Sierra Club named its Yosemite Valley lodge after LeConte.

But in 2016 the Sierra Club discovered that Joseph LeConte and John Muir were human. LeConte had promoted white racial superiority, and in his youth Muir had said some unkind things about black people and American Indians. So the morally superior Sierra Club leadership decided that LeConte and Muir could not pass its ideological purity test, and it cancelled LeConte and removed his name from its lodge in the valley, as I learned when I went there. The Sierra Club zealots have not yet cancelled founder John Muir, but they have considered doing so.

To my knowledge Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt have not been condemned by the Sierra Club – yet. But in 2021 the San Francisco Board of Education attempted to rename schools named after both of those men and John Muir, as well as schools named for George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and others, for whatever transgressions offended the school board. So the Sierra Club is hardly alone in its politically correct pandering to current sensibilities.

But if we continue to insist upon judging historical figures by the latest standards of social conduct and etiquette, we will eventually realize that all of the heroes of the past – and present – are defective. And not just the heroes. I bet that if you could put the lives of the Sierra Club leadership and the Board of Education under a microscope, you’d find that every single man and woman of them is flawed in one way or another. Probably in several ways. Just like the rest of us.

So I decided that every day during my stay in the Sierras, the mountains that John Muir called the Range of Light, I would rise above the pettiness of the leftwing groupthink dogma and celebrate the magnificence of Yosemite that has been bequeathed to us by Muir, LeConte, Lincoln, Roosevelt, and other imperfect beings.

Every day in Yosemite I said prayers of appreciation to the sequoias or oaks and to the aforementioned defenders of its mountains and river and forests. Every day I gave back healing energy to Half Dome and El Capitan and the Merced River, as well as to Yosemite Falls, Bridalveil Falls, Vernal Falls, and Nevada Falls. Every day I touched some part of nature with my hands and said “Holy, holy, holy” and “Thank you, thank you, thank you.” Every day I gave thanks to Gaia for its healing energy, and gave thanks to what Muir called “the grandeur of the Yosemite temple.”

And here and now I leave you with three quotes from John Muir’s book My First Summer in the Sierra:

Who wouldn’t be a mountaineer! Up here all the world’s prizes seem nothing.

Nature’s inexhaustible abundance…is eternally flowing from use to use, beauty to yet higher beauty; and soon we cease to lament waste and death, and rather rejoice and exult in the imperishable, unspendable wealth of the universe, and faithfully watch and wait the reappearance of everything that melts and fades and dies about us, feeling sure that its next appearance will be better and more beautiful than the last.

I have crossed the Range of Light, surely the brightest and best of all the Lord has built; and rejoicing in its glory, I gladly, gratefully, hopefully pray I may see it again.