OVER THE ANDES TO BOGOTA 



By Frank M. Chapman * 



Curator of Birds, American Museum of Natural History 



THE lure of Colombia's manifold 

 resources has long exerted its in- 

 fluence on the prospector, whose 

 love for exploration is tempered by a de- 

 sire for some tangible return for the 

 effort expended. Gold and platinum, 

 ivory nuts, rubber, orchids, and, more 

 recently, oil, have all drawn hundreds of 

 eager seekers for wealth to her vast and 

 varied territory. 



But to those who love travel for the 

 .wealth of experiences it may bring, who 

 revel in glorious scenery, who find fresh 

 interests in new or strange forms of vege- 

 table and animal life, and in the customs 

 of foreign peoples, Colombia is almost an 

 unknown land. 



Cartagena is occasionally visited by 

 tourists, and Santa Marta, lying at the 

 base of the superb group of snow-crowned 

 mountains of the same name, may be 

 known to those who travel on fruit-bear- 

 ing steamers ; but Barranquilla, the me- 

 tropolis of northern Colombia, is twenty 

 miles from the sea ; Buenaventura and 

 Tumaco, her only Pacific ports, are not 

 familiar as names to even most traveled 

 people, while Bogota, her capital city, 

 with a population of 130,000 or more, 

 seems as remote as Lhasa. 



This is all wrong. It is high time 

 Colombia's attractions for the tourist 

 were more widely known, and as a means 

 toward that wholly desirable end I pro- 

 pose to outline here a Colombian tour, on 

 which any one who can sit astride a mule 

 may embark with the assurance that he 

 will not be exposed to more hardships 

 than the traveler off beaten trails expects 

 to find. In retrospect these minor dis- 

 comforts often become positive pleasures, 

 or, at any rate, the bases of those tales 



* From 1911-1915 the author of this article 

 directed a biological survey of the Colombian 

 Andes for the American Museum of Natural 

 History. The results of his researches in field 

 and study are embodied in a 700-page Museum 

 bulletin on the "Distribution of Bird Life in 

 Colombia." In this volume, which was awarded 

 the Elliot gold medal by the National Academy 

 of Sciences, the life-zones of the Colombian 

 Andes are defined and an attempt made to de- 

 termine the origin of their bird life. — Editor. 



without which travel would be merely 

 uneventful transportation. 



NO RISKS TO IvlFK, LIMB, OR PROPERTY 



As for risks to life and limb, I know 

 of no safer country than Colombia. The 

 "hold-ups" and other forms of highway 

 robbery of daily occurrence in many large 

 cities in the United States are practically 

 unknown in Colombia. 



During the six years when parties from 

 the American Museum explored the re- 

 public from end to end, we lost not one 

 single article from an equipment a large 

 part of which — camp utensils, guns, 

 knives, etc. — must have seemed highly de- 

 sirable in native eyes. Indeed, I recall 

 that on passing through a small town 

 where we had previously established our 

 headquarters a woman ran out to give us 

 a needle and thread one of our men had 

 left sticking in the wall of his room! 



Our work brought us into contact with 

 men of every class, and from high and 

 low alike we received only courteous 

 and hospitable treatment. Where we 

 brought letters of introduction, this might 

 have been expected, but where we came 

 unknown and unannounced we were in- 

 variably welcomed and given every avail- 

 able facility to pursue our natural-history 

 researches — this, too, it must be remem- 

 bered, at a time when North Americans, 

 as a nation, were far from popular in 

 Colombia. But I have always found in 

 Latin America that an individual is ac- 

 cepted or rejected on his own merits or 

 demerits without regard to his nation- 

 ality. 



During the World War Colombia is 

 said to have sympathized with the Central 

 Powers, but I know of a city from which 

 a German was expelled because he re- 

 fused to rise when the band played our 

 National Anthem, while an American, 

 who possessed that measure of tact ful- 

 ness, courtesy, and consideration for 

 others which are included in the Spanish 

 word simpatico, was the most popular 

 foreigner in the town. In a word, then, 

 the traveler may go unarmed, and so long 



