A La Orden Colombia!

Our time in Colombia has come to a close, with Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and Argentina ahead of us it’s hard to be sad but it was with a sigh that we crossed the border. Colombia has been very good to us, from its beautiful scenery to its Caribbean beaches to it’s fantastic food, hikes, coffee, the list goes on, but the one thing that makes Colombia quite so special is the people, never have I been anywhere where people are quite so friendly and open without wanting anything in return, apart from a chat, a smile and to know how you feel about their home.

We left off the previous blog with a hangover probably, carnival was over and we waved goodbye to brilliant Barranquilla and hopped a short distance down the coast to Classy Cartagena. It was a world away from the down-to-earth grit, heat and music of carnival, it was like stepping in to Southern European city, though Cartagena would give even Monaco or Portofino a run for their money in terms of beauty, beaches and pure opulence! If you stayed within the walls of the old town (walls slightly pock-marked by the canons of none other than Francis Drake - it’s always exciting when you hear of one of your own historical figures popping up in other people’s stories!) it was as if you had left the rough and tumble of Colombia behind and could wander the beautiful cobbled streets and perfectly renovated buildings for hours.

Cartagena

Mike on the Cartagena walking tour

Hannah on the old walls

The old walls protect the shiny new hotels in the distance

Beautifully restored old town

Caribbean Cartagena

Ann and Steve at the fort

Horse and carriage rides

Wine cellar

Botero sculpture

Public art was everywhere

Local Cartagena market - a world away from the old town

With forts and museums to explore it was easy to fill 4 days here, though much of it was spent sitting in squares and people watching, and if all the wealth, opulence and price tags to go with got too much you could step outside the city walls and visit Colombia proper, the local market being something of an assult on the senses. Cartagena is blessed with stunning beaches too and much of the group headed to the beach to kite surf, lay on the sand and swim.

Fish at the market

White sand, blue sea

Wayne and Danielle in the perfect turquoise ocean

Coconut, mango and ice cream come to you here!

Cartagena was also where we were to say a sad goodbye to Donna, Glenn, Maddie and Lou who had to head off in different directions and back to the real world, of course we took the opportunity to go out for sunset, sangria and salsa, an eventful and fun night was had by all!

Donna and Glenn's last night in South America

Hannah, Toby & Ann

AJ, Maddie, Lou & Mike

The group say bye to Donna, Glenn, Lou & Maddie

Whilst it was goodbye for some it was hello again to Steve who rejoined us after heading off on an Amazon adventure, he came back with stories of sleeping in hammocks and sharing a boat with pigs and chickens! So now thoroughly relaxed and Carribbean-ified we left Cartagena and after negotiating a diversion through the local market... 

We love a good desvio (diversion!)

...we headed off on a 2 day drive toward a very different city: Medellin.

En route we treated the group to a stop at a nice little hotel/resort complete with pool and more blissful air-con, not necessarily pure overlanding but much appreciated by everyone!

Very yellow trees en route south

Ann makes friends at one of our lunch stops, it's not hard to make friends in Colombia!

Our motel / resort moment of luxury

Then the flatness of Northern Colombia stopped abruptly as we hit the hills again around the Rio Cauca. 

Heading up into the hills and the clouds

Colombian driving is best described as covering short distances in long, slow, arduous days, dealing with tankers taking up both lanes on tight bends with sheer drops down the side, dogs lying in the road and refusing to move and motorbikes pulling in tight in front of you and slamming on the brakes to get a closer look at the gringo-mobil! It’s fun, it’s slow and it’s never boring!

So, Medellin! Tell any Colombian that you’re visiting Medellin and they’ll look at you strangely and ask why, for God’s sake just don’t tell them it’s because you’re interested in Pablo Escobar, they’ll shake their head and look sad and you’ll feel a bit guilty for wanting to dig up something that they’re so desperate to forget and move on from. But the fact is Medellin is tied up inextricably with its most famous son, cartel overlord and at one point one of the richest men in the world. At the height of his power Medellin was known as the cocaine capital of the world. To the poor he is a kind of folk hero, a Robin Hood who built schools and hospitals, but to the rest of the world he is a villain, killing thousands and generally giving the country the reputation of being dangerous and drug-infested, an opinion that many of us in the group had come up against when telling family and friends we were going to Colombia. Today this couldn’t be more wrong but Medellin gave us the chance to learn more about Escobar. Many of the group headed off on a Pablo Escobar tour where they learned about the man and even visited his brother. It caused complex emotional reactions and much discussion back at the hostel that evening.

But poor Medellin, even in this blog all I’ve written about is Pablo Escobar! It has much more to offer than that, at its heart it is friendly, welcoming, amazingly clean and new and shiny and pretty wealthy too. It’s a favourite Gringo hang-out these days with lots of international cuisine, bright young office workers lunching on the plazas and it has a real cosmopolitan feel to it. It is also home to Fernando Botero, sculptor and painter famous for his portrayal of full-bodied, exaggerated figures and someone who many Medellinos would prefer to be their ‘most famous son.’ It also has a fantastic cable car designed to transport commuters to their homes in the hills but also gives tourists a cheap way of seeing the vast hilly city as it clings to the hillsides.

Joanna and Ann enjoying the Botero sculptures in Medellin

Botero

Bartley admires the cars in the Poblado suburb where we stayed

Medellin clings to the hills

And has a fantastic public transport system

Not to mention a really cheap cable car..

... which affords beautiful views of the town

The boys (and Hannah) in Medellin

We set off from Medellin on a short drive to a new destination for Odyssey, Guatapé. The small town sits on a man made lake, formed in the 1970s when the valley was flooded to create a reservoir, inundating the small village of Peñol. We were there during the peaceful mid-week period and almost had the run of the place. 30 years before this whole area was the holiday retreat of the Cartel, the beautiful lakes were dotted with large estates, many of which had at one time belonged to Escobar’s right hand men. It has now become a safe retreat for locals and gringos alike and we all enjoyed wandering the pretty colourful town and relaxing at our lovely hostel, trying to remember how to camp after a few weeks of hotels!

Guatape colour

Guatape artwork

Shopping

Hannah, Mike & Toby on the bridge

Andrew & Johnny

DFG (deep fried goodness) in Guatape

Our hostel / camp gave us a little apartment for our stay which we made our home

As it turns out, toasting a marshmallow then dipping it in dulce de leche and cream is very tasty

Some of the group also went hiking to stunning waterfalls (which they mostly found!)

Bartley & Triona out hiking

Steve & Bartley having a dip

Many of the group headed out on to the lake on a boat trip. The latter took us to 2 very interesting spots, one was the last remaining house of the flooded village of Peñol, which had belonged to an Italian doctor who had 36 kids and had been assasinated by one of them, the whole thing sounded like a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel! We also had the chance to look around Pablo Escobar’s old holiday home, bombed a year before his death by his enemies and left to rot it felt more like a film set than a house. It was a strange and slightly uncomfortable experience, we were guided by a man who answered our questions with single syllables, when asked if he had met Escobar he shrugged and shook his head but what he didn’t say said more than what he did, and added to the general atmosphere of unease and trespassing.

Heading off on the boat trip

Andrew and mandatory dog at the Italian doctor's house

Pablo's old holiday home

Steve

Johnny

Guatape is also close to the strange rock formation of ‘El Peñol’ a sugarloaf rock formation which has had steep zip-like stairs latched on to the side to afford views of the beautiful countryside around. Many of the group headed up to explore and the morning cloud mercifully cleared a little for them!

El Peñol, the GI comes from a local rivalry about who owns the rock, the people of Guatape began to write their name on it which incensed the people of the rebuilt Peñol village who put a stop to it!

The rock in situ

Just a gentle uphill stroll...

Toby, Wayne, Danielle, Mike & Joanna

AJ

Triona enjoys the well-earned view

Great "jumping photo" opportunity for Wayne & Danielle

From Guatape we headed on to coffee-country! Salento was our next stop, nestled in the hills of the Cocora valley which form the foothills of the huge Nevado del Ruiz volcano. Salento was an immediate favourite with the group. Colombia and coffee are inextricably linked, it was brought over by European colonisers from Java and since then has joined the ranks of South America’s plethora of products that give you energy and keep you awake! (Coca, chocolate, mate, dulce de leche etc etc!) We headed off to a joint Colombian-British owned coffee plantation where we were shown the process of growing, drying, skinning, roasting, grinding, percolating and thankfully, drinking!

Salento

The view from our hotel in Salento

Salento town

Delivering milk for cafe con leche

Walking to the coffee plantation

Explaining the coffee process

Different stages

Skinning

Roasting

Grinding (the smells were driving us mad by this time!)

Ann loves coffee!

The plantation also had a range of other local plants from bamboo to bananas to pineapples which we explored. As well as trying the wonderful food down in Salento town.

Exploring the coffee plantation

AJ and pineapples

Johnny ready for the run in Brunch, our favourite Salento restaurant

Ellie in brunch

The area is fantastic for walks too, many of us headed off on the Valle de Cocora walk, a beautiful loop through cloud forests, hummingbird sanctuaries and precarious bridges. Bartley and Triona even managed to accidentally walk up to almost 4000m whilst looking for the easiest path back!

Ellie, Hannah & Ann in the Cocora Valley

Triona on one of the many bridges

River crossing

Mike, Toby, Ann & Joanna

Hikers

Hummingbirds

We also arranged a group game of Tejo, essentially a mix between boules and fireworks night. It was imported by the Spanish and many of the locals claim it’s the only good thing the Spanish left behind. Essentially you have a lump of heavy metal which you throw at a bed of clay which has a metal ring, on which are perched a series of small packets of gunpowder. The idea is to connect the metal of the ring with the lump you throw which makes the gunpowder explode. It’s fun, it’s a bit shocking and it brings out the pyromaniac inside everyone! Beer was actually mandatory, they marketed it to us as ‘tejo: beer and gunpowder’ so we were in! It got a little competitive and slightly out of hand when we started attaching packets of gunpowder to pool balls, much to the amusement of the owners. Emma and Simon are currently working on a business plan to import Tejo to the UK, watch this space...

Emma explains the rules

The locals show us how it's done

Wayne and Bartley with their exploded packets of gunpowder

Next we had another Odyssey first, a stay in Cali. Cali is the home of salsa, the dance was invented and refined there, mixing african rhythms with Spanish instruments, and given life by the impossibly mobile hips of the local people. It is not a normal tourist destination, The Lonely Planet is indifferent to it at best, but Emma and Simon ignored the LP (with whom they have a love-hate relationship) and confused questions from the group about why on earth we were going and went anyway. We stayed in a beautiful hostel, La Maison Violette, run by a French ex-pat who has been thoroughly won over by Colombia’s spell, in San Antonio, a bohemian suburb with beautiful views of the city, an artisan market and fantastic stained glass, quirky houses, and beautiful tiles everywhere. Cali definitely has an edge, it’s covered with fantastic graffiti, it streets are scattered with more rubbish than Medellin’s, there are more dodgy-looking characters hanging out on street corners than Bogota. Much like Barranquilla it is a real city where real people live out their real lives, it hasn’t been tourist-ified and this divided many of the group about whether they liked it. But that’s what overland travel is all about, trying new things, getting off the tourist trail and getting to know real places and people.

Cali artwork

Steve in the "cat park" downtown - the cat is an emblem of the city

San Antonio neighbourhood

View from the roof of the hotel (thanks to Maison Violette for this one)

The park near San Antonio church (thanks for this one too!)

Cali boasts an excellent zoo which played host to a bunch of us, the city’s sweltering heat put most people off climbing up the ‘3 Crosses Hill’ but we did make a point of enjoying some great restaurants close to the hostel, enjoying pizza one night and for the 2nd night a few of us bit the bullet and headed to a slightly pricey but fantastic meal at ‘Teatro Magico del Sabor’ (The Theatre of the Wizard of Flavour.) Our host was Mike Lynch, half Colombian half Scotts Irish-American, he was a real showman and fantastic chef. The set up was a row of seats facing an open kitchen where you watched Mike cook your dinner and explain about the methods, ingredients and occasionally hurling some light-hearted abuse at you (sometimes in the form of a song) which we happily returned. We enjoyed amazing fresh lulo (local fruit) cocktails, the best ribs any of us had ever tasted and rice pudding that would, as our host put it, ‘charm the pants off the Virgin Mary’ it sounds like a big claim, but to be fair, he was probably right! The general consensus was it was best meal of the trip so far and worth every centavo!

Teatro Magico del Sabor (thanks Google, we were too busy eating to take photos!)

We waved goodbye to Cali and headed on to Popayan, somewhere we had visited on the way North. We said hello again to the Scottish owners (more ex-pats who can’t bring themselves to leave Colombia - notice a theme here?!) It gave us more time to explore the beautiful white-washed old town and cobbled streets, it also gave some of us a chance to have a salsa lesson with lovely Carlos, a local dance teacher. Poor Carlos had to deal with our very un practiced hip-waggling but he did it all with patience and some of us surprised ourselves with what we learned. Despite the sweat and aching the next day everyone thoroughly enjoyed it, much of the lesson was spent giggling at each other, it was fun all round, even if Eamon’s words at the end were ‘never again!’

Eamon and AJ

Ellie, Carlos & Triona

Practicing turns

Team Salsa (team sweaty!)

Popayan also gave some of the group the opportunity to head off on mountain bikes to explore the hills around the town, even Hannah braved getting back on a bike after her San Gil episode and they were rewarded with hot springs to bathe in, fantastic scenery and lovely little cafes and friendly locals along the way, even if many people came back saying ‘that was definitely NOT all downhill’ with big smiles on their faces!

Ann & Bartley avoided the salsa and went downhill mountain biking with some new American friends

Ann has hot chocolate and cheese (a local speciality!)

The nice thing about visiting a place twice is you don't feel the pressure to stick to the tourist highlights

Mike, Hannah, Joanna and Steve also went off on a very early morning adventure to Puracé National Park to climb one of the numerous volcanoes. A beautiful morning turned in to rain and wind and only 2 of them made it to the top through sheer grit and determination, even leaving their guide behind who refused to carry on, when they insisted they were fine he made the sign of the cross at them and left them to it! Whilst not the wisest idea they made it back safe and sound with a great story to tell! (and not too many photos, I think the cloud, wind and rain made photography a bit pointless, and dangerous!)

So finally we headed South on a bit of road we knew well from the way North, the stunning winding part of the Panamerica from Popayan to Ipiales, just on the border with Ecuador. 

Colombian roadworks

Soaking up the scenery

Saying bye to the beautiful Colombian hills

The best snow cones in all Colombia - topped with lime, syrup and condensed milk

More than the views, walks, food or coffee it was the people that had made Colombia so special for us; friendly, full-on, nosey and always with a smile on their faces and a dance in their hips. They are excessively polite, Emma was being questioned by a 10 year old boy in San Augustin about where she was from and what she was doing here, he ended by saying, in beautiful Spanish, ‘well it’s been an absolutely pleasure to talk to you and I hope you have a wonderful journey’ and ran off giggling with his cousin. They are charming beyond belief and so happy to have visitors in their country. A phrase that you hear more than any other here is ‘A la orden’ which translates roughly as ‘at your service’ whether they’re selling you something, serving you dinner, or just checking you in to their hotel they cannot do enough for you and constantly ask how you like their country.

So to say thank you for the fantastic hospitality shown to us through the country I can go some way to repay it by telling you this: forget everything you think you know about Colombia, it is safer, more beautiful and friendlier than you ever imagined. In 10 years its secret will be out so visit now before the world and their aunt arrives, you can’t fail to fall in love. A la orden Colombia!