The Week of Living Dangerously

Salsa dancing, pork cracklings and aguardiente… A guy goes looking for trouble and finds fun in Bogotá.

By Matthew Mallon

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Central Bogota

Photo by Leopoldo Ramírez Silva

Bogotá, it’s true, is a dangerous place.

You have to be careful not to become too trusting of new acquaintances or you might be coaxed into a taxicab and driven to a remote location in which you will be forced to dance freestyle salsa in front of hundreds of horrified Colombians.

Your new friends will make you drink aguardiente (a throat-stripping hard liquor you’d rather not really know much about) in little wooden cups and feed you morcilla (a blood sausage stuffed with rice and beans, very tasty), chicharrón (heart-stopping pork cracklings) and ajiaco (a thick corn soup with four different kinds of potato – three more than you’d heard of before). They will tell you that the late Susan Sontag was here a few years ago and called it the greatest restaurant in the world and will show you photographic proof of this.

Time will pass. The Canadian anthem will suddenly fill the 2,000-seat room and a small parade will occupy the dance floor, led by a young woman carrying the maple leaf. And then they will call over a complaisant waitress who will make you dance the salsa, badly, in front of the whole room. And there will not be enough aguardiente in the world to help you forget the shocked and awed faces of the diners as they watch you cha-cha-wha? past their tables.

That’s the particular danger that awaited me on the evening Esther Farfán took me to Andrés Carne de Res, a restaurant/nightclub/magical-realist-kitsch emporium on the outskirts of Bogotá. Farfán is an actress whose North American career highlight was the 1979 film Cocaine Cowboys, in which she starred with Jack Palance and Andy Warhol. I’d met her through her husband, music promoter, producer and self-confessed eternal hustler Andrew Loog Oldham, who worked with the Rolling Stones back in the early 1960s and moved to Bogotá in the mid-1970s. Last fall, Oldham and I lunched in Vancouver, where I’d asked him about danger and Bogotá. After all, danger is that city’s most defining characteristic, as far as the outside world is concerned. I wanted to know how prepared I should be – and how much I should lie to my girlfriend. “Listen, man,” Oldham said in his English ‘60s survivor drawl. “I’ve lived there for 30 years and I’m not a masochist. If it bothered me, I’d leave.”

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