According to Wikipedia, Monserrate rises to 3,152 metres (10,341 ft) above the sea level.

My friend Aletta agreed to join me to hike Mount Monserrate last Friday. We started walking from Las Aguas transmilenio station at exactly 9:50AM. 

  

Well what can I say? Bogotá is already lying 2,640 meters (8,660 ft) above sea level.  Going further up was a real challenge specially that I’ve only been here 6 weeks. 

  

Look at our faces here. We’re like…”what the heck are we thinking?” 😂

Aletta is one of the funniest people I know. She surely made our hike fun. Eventually, laughing while hiking was making us more tired so we had to prevent ourselves from laughing. 

We of course made a few stops. Banana, anyone? 😉 

  

Look at us…still happy despite the fact that we were exhausted. 

 
I think we were halfway when this picture was taken. This is my favorite picture of us. 

  
Look behind us! We’ve come a long way. We thought we were close here and boy we were so wrong. But hey, we still look happy. 😊

  
At this point, we thought we were about to reach the top but then again, we were wrong. We don’t look tired at all, do we? We were still happy while Aletta sings “The World’s Greatest” which was perfect for this journey.

  
Until we finally saw something white! Must be  part of the church! We were getting close!!!

  

Apparently here,  we were almost on top. Almost, but not quite.

  

   
We finally reached the top at 11:20AM. It took us 1 1/2 hours which was not bad at all. We did good.

   
 

We headed to Casa Santa Clara for lunch! Bandeja Paisa seemed to be perfect after that hike. An order costs COP 25,000 which I think was worth it considering we were on top of Mount Monserrate. 

  
We took the train on the way back down for COP 8,500 per ticket. Cable car would have neen nice but the waiting time was 40 minutes compare to the 5 minutes wait for the train. The train looks scary from afar but it wasn’t once you’re inside. 

  
When we took the transmilenio to head back north, it was almost empty. We decided to sit on the chairs dedicated for disable, elderly and pregnant women. We considered ourselves disabled after that hike. 😂  

 

 We  headed to the Nike Factory Store to get our reward and then we called it a day. 

  
It was such an achievement. I can’t believe we did it! We survived! We’re proud! 

Mount Monserrate is now ticked off our list. 😊

 

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