Mago Bill: First Essay on Colombian Travel, Beginning With Bogota
Working from The Pocket Guide of Colombian Hostels, I find that the Casa Platypus is a good place to sleep in Bogota. Bogota is a great big city and the capital of Colombia. The Casa Platypus is a hostel. A hostel is a kind of hotel designed for foreign travelers. It is also often a place to get useful information and to have a chance for finding someone who speaks a language you know. The personnel and proprietors of such hostels are often welcoming people from far off lands. You may expect those of the Casa Platypus to be such.
The colonial(or republican style) building of the Platypus overlooks a plaza called Parque de las Periodistas.
Journalist:
"Periodistas" can be translated as "journalists." I find journalists to be an interesting breed which has not quite died out. "Died out" may not quire be the best way to put it. World-wide, journalists seem too often to be killed before they can die a natural death. Assassinated my be the more honest word.
Journalists around the world are being assassinated for doing their best to inform us honestly. They would like to tell us the truth about what the see going on around us. They used to find out about goings on, happenings, and doings far and wide as well as close to home. They used to be able to us about them without so often having to gamble their lives to do so. Today their odds are worse than ever.
Journalists have carried on their craft for a couple of hundred years or so. Some of them are still trying to inform us about that which is going on. However, we have been killing, jailing, imprisoning them and hiring fewer of them per capita for decades. So now we have fewer of them and they have fewer employers. I remember, as a Boy Scout, being taught that "honesty is the best policy." Still, perhaps, true. Now for our lack of responsibility or even interest, it has been a death sentence for journalistic honesty. What are we to tell our youth and children? The answer is "nothing," isn't it? Shall we say that raising our children and youth in ignorance is for the best.
Rather than not getting the backstory, we get no story at all. Unless it be the watered down fairy tales we are beginning to learn to prefer. We have yet to get from the WWW that which we had from a free press. We are beginning to get some stability of stable reporting on the web, but often just as we source of reporting which we feel we trust, it may disappear.
There are other "Parques de las Periodistas" in other Colombia cities. I know of one in Medellin. What remanent of journalism do you have in your country?
Gabriel Garcia Marquez:
This park in the Candelaria section of Bogota has been dedicated to a good and careful journalist whom you may know as a famous modern novelist. That novelist is Gabriel Garcia Marquez. He is an admirer of those who still practice journalism and has backed up his admiration with solid support.
One can't find a place to sleep in Colombia without learning something interesting there.
Tell us where you find your most useful reporting.
Thank you for reading.
RCS