At Puerto Berrio, five hundred miles up the river, a railway runs to the interesting city of Medellin, in the mountains, the second city in importance in Colombia. There are, from La Dorada, various changes to be made before Bogota is reached. We must change to the railway that runs to--near--Honda, circumventing the rapids, a line about twenty miles long. Here we have a choice of routes and methods. We may proceed on mule-back through magnificent scenery and the refreshing atmosphere of the Andes, with tolerable inns, or we may take the steamer again to Giradot, on the Upper Magdalena, and then a further trajectory of eighty miles by rail. Seven changes are necessary in this journey from Cartagena to the capital--ocean-steamer to train, thence to river-steamer, from that to the train again, thence to river-steamer once more, thence to the train, and again to another train--doubtless a record of varied travel. The remote and famous city of Santa Fé de Bogota, founded by Quesada in 1538, the old viceregal capital of New Granada, the "Athens of South America" as some of its admirers have termed it, stands pleasingly upon its _Sabana_, or upland plain--one of the largest cultivated mountain plateaux in the world--at an elevation of 8,600 feet above sea-level, higher than the famous city of Mexico. It is in the heart of the Tropics, but four degrees north of the Equator, and its equable climate, a result of the offsetting of latitude by altitude, is in many respects delightful. Here the typical Spanish American character is stamped on the city and reflected in the life of its people, where Parisian dress rubs shoulders with the blanketed Indian. Here the aristocracy of Colombia, implanted by Spain, centres. One street may be lined with the handsome residences of the correct and elegant upper class, folk perhaps educated in foreign universities, men of the world, passing by in silk hat and frock-coat--attire beloved of the wealthy here--or in motor-car or carriage, which whirls past the groups of half-starved, half-clothed (and perhaps half-drunken) Indian or poor Mestizo folk, whose homes are in the hovels of a neighbouring street and whose principal source of entertainment is the _chicheria_, or drinking-den, such as exists in profusion. And without desiring to institute undue comparisons--for wealth and misery go side by side in London or New York, or any city of Christendom--it may be pointed out that despite the claim of Bogota to be a centre of literary thought and high culture, little more perhaps than a tenth of the population of Colombia can read and write.