Arrival in Medellin

A few days ago I changed my travel plans and booked a flight to Medelllin from Cali, as I did not relish the though of another long bus journey and I am glad that I did.

In the early morning I met up with my Y' again for breakfast, and take a short stroll around Chipichapi Mall again, as all the nearby restaurants from my hostel were not open this early in the morning.

I got back in plenty of time to check out and get a taxi to the airport, but the rain had started and when it rains in Colombia, few people walk, so the taxi took almost half an hour to arrive and by the time that it got me to the airport my flight was already checking in and letting you go direct to the gate in preparation to board.

Cali airport is a little on the small size, and I found very little to do once I had checked in, and with no obveous wifi stations I was prepared to just wait when a friendly German hairdresser started to chat with me for the duration. In no time at all we were old friends and a few times he started talking in German, then checked himself and apologised but said that I looked German so his brain just assumed it before he put his brain into gear.

Sadly we were not seated together on the small propellar plane from Cali to Medelin, but we had already agreed to split the cost of the taxi fare from the airport into the city centre, which would save us both around £6 so was well worth it.

On the way we chatted about lots of stuff and by the end I had given him my card and told him if he wants to meet up to email me as my phone is normally switched off, and he said that he might but if he did it would be from someone else as he didnt like computers very much and had nothing set up.

I arrived in the Hostel and found that it was a nice place, in the south, but with a good reputation and filled with English Speaking tourists, although for some reason I just wanted to get out and about and find a map, as typically they gave me one that was about 4 roads in all directions from their hostel, which is only good for directing taxis to but not much cop if you plan on journeying out.

I walked and walked and eventually came to a big shopping plaza that was just past McDonalds that was all geared up for christmas and luckily had city maps, so I bought a main one and a mini map for taking with me on excursions into the city.

Getting back was a bit more of an effort, as I tried to use the map I had just bough and found that it was a bit out of date, as there had been a lot of new construction in the last 2 years and now many extra turning and sidings were there that are not on my little map, thus taking the second left or right no longer was correct.

I did manage to make it back after dark, but I was extremely shocked and disturbed to see a couple of girls, no more than 13 get picked up at the end of the road, first one and then the other by the same large black 4x4, and I really disagree with young teenagers doing that sort of thing.

Back in the hostel I found that my friends here in Medellin were still in hiding, and with the weather very rainy that night I made my mind up to cut and run early instead of to stay for the full three days and try to make better use of my time in Manizales and Medellin where my friends were in regular contact and eagerly waiting to meet me.

At 11pm I was the first person to go to sleep in my dorm room, and also the first to wake up at 7am the following morning.

I had checked the weather forcast and it said that it would be hot and sunny during the day and only start chucking the rain down again at about 5pm, so I figured that I could get a good half day in the city centre before grabbing a long distance bus from here to Manizales.

I strongly suggest that all tourists use the metro to get around in Medellin, as it is cheap, fast, easy to use and best of all it is not underground but overground high above the streets and houses, with an impressive view of the city and a perfect place to take photos or to spot where you visit.

After reaching the centre I spend a good few hours walking around, taking photos, getting lost and then finding myself again somewhere totally different and I got so turned around that I picked up the metro to come back a good three stops away from where I arrived.

It is true that Medellin is the centre of the world and hub for all the most attractive looking women in the world, and I can see men come here to find girlfriends or wives as they were everywhere and I had a new favourite every few minutes. In fact I strongly was tempted to go high up in a restaurant, set up my camera on digital video and just let it run, but then that would be considered rude and intrusive.

As it was I just had to enjoy the view walking around the town, content that as this was the same the second time that I visited this city it is unlikely to be a fluke and there would just as likely be many attractive women the next time I come here when the weather would be better and so hopefully would my Spanish.

Having now been to several latin american countries I have seen, heard and witness a phenomenon enough time to know that it is genuine and not just internet hype or camp fire stories.
Generally Latin men seem to be very bad to their native women, both verbally, physically and dating several of them at once, that a growing minority of latin women are eager to find a suitable gringo and marry them instead. Of course, some tourists are taking unfair advantage of this, but most often the westerners are just astounded when these beautiful latin women are willing to bed and marry them, more so for their kind nature more than their wallets or passports.
In fact, the few that I have talked to are much more interested in finding a gringo that wants to move and live over in South America than they are interested in uprooting themselves and coming to live in Europe, and when you experience the weather and the cost of things you can see their point. Europe is no longer considered the ideal place to live and western men are no longer being so sought after just as a way of entering into the country.

The scary fact is that western women often find latin men attractive and exotic, so perhaps in future there will be many more mulatto babies and being of clear racial descendents will become much harder to prove.

Around 4pm I came back to my hostel to check out and grab a but before it got dark, but as it had just started to rain waiting for the taxi took longer than it should and I missed my bus by a few minutes, having to wait for almost an hour for the next one.
The bus was a six hour ride, and thankfully they showed a couple of movies, the first was Indian Jones 4, and the second was a strange Indian film about a boy who lost his sisters shoe and then all the fuss he has to try and get it back, to let her use his shoes to get to school an then he finally runs a long distance race and ruins them so that they both had no shoes to wear. I didn't really get the point of it, plus it was in quiet dubbed Spanish, so when it was over I was as confused as I was when it started.
The rain was really chucking it down when I arrived in Manizales around 11pm and thankfully the taxi driver knew where to go and I decided to splash out and treat myself to a private room for $30,000 pesos a night, which works to be around £8 for the privacy it was well worth it.

An unexpected night in Cali

I am fine here, there are a few decorations out wherever I go, but at 30 plus degrees and surrounded by palm trees and sand it is hard to image that Christmas is so close, it will not be the same this year, not unless I can find a traditional English Pub in Dominican Republic to spend it in.

I called my sister for her birthday, it was a nice surprise for her and I realised that I could have / should have called home on other birthday, but I just dont like the phone and also with the time difference it is very hard to arrange, not to mention the cost.

I am dreading what will have happened to my garden by the time that I return, and I feel in mixed sorts as a part of me loves to travel and meet new people, but I am really getting bored of bad hostels, restaurants serving things that I dont recognise or like and bedrooms that are either too hot or too cold and having to hide under thin sheets to hide from mosquito's or other flying insects.

In my house I have a quiet fan for the heat and a radiator plus blankets for the cold, but here it is almost always too hot and my bedroom fans here is so powerful that I think they stole if from a wind tunnel experiement and even with ear plugs I still have problems getting to sleep.

I won't be doing much Christmas shopping today, as the cost to send stuff back to the UK from here is astronomical, but I will be thinking of you all of course.

Please ensure that you get the most of carol singers, snow, christmas turkeys, crackers, chocolates and movies, I'd like to share them all with you so please keep me posted and send me photos as often as you can.

This trip has been one I will never forget and the people I am meeting are great and I have met a few that I would like to see more of, a lot more of, but equally I have arrived in some cities and been totally unimpressed from arrival to leaving, so its upps are even higher because of the downs.

Colombia does have a lot of history, but it does not seem to advertise its pre-columbian roots very much, so I will be looking forward to central America and Mexico, when I should be able to visit not only Chichen Itza but other stuff from the Aztecs, Mayans and Tultec cultures, which means lots more photos from me too.

I seemed to have travelled through the home sickness stage now, as I no longer suffer the nervousness, the emotional episodes or the mild panic attacks of being alone and equally now when I get lost through being all turned around or find myself in a place that I do not recognise I just see it as a waste of time and an inconvenience rather instead of a problem that needs to be overcome.

Likewise I think that I have got used to the food and the water, as I have not had a bad case of food poisoning or anything since leaving Cusco, although being fair I have lost a bit of weight since I first left the UK but this is through just not finding enough stuff to my palate, as even when I do eat I don't eat til I am full but just enough to starve off the feeling of hunger and then carry on with the day.

Without chocolate spread, strawberry jam, cornflakes or a proper fried breakfast in any of the places that I visit, I tend to find that I am skipping breakfasts more and more these days, but then I just dont like eating large rolls or giant mutated bananas first thing in the morning.

Staying in hostels means that often I am meant to be bringing my own food but as it is heavy to carry and cumbersome ( not to mention that your not allowed to fly with foods or drinks ) so this is another reason for this.

I still have not used most of the setting on my camera, although I have used it a few times as a digital camera but only really for wide panoramic shots when one photo just cannot capture it all no matter from what angle or viewpoint I chose.

I do seem to be spending a bit of time watching tv now, but part of that is to hear someone, anyone, speaking fluent english, and the rest is that I do not really know what to do with my time after 8pm when the rain starts to pour down and I am trying not to spend my money like it is water.

I guess that I could grab a taxi each night and ask me to visit either a billiard hall, a cinema, a bar or a night club but any of those would still involve spending money and I have tried many times to take photos at night and my camera is just not up to it, apart from it being more unsafe and much harder to navigate around a place, especially as I rarely have a decent map to guide me around.


Well I have to go now, I need to pack and try to find out how to get to Cartagena while the morning is still here that way I can reach my hostel while it is still light as the bus journey is meant to be abour six hours long and I still don't know where it leaves from or when just now.

Cali, Drugs and a biker called Mikkel

After a night spent trying to find some places to go in Cali myself, I gave up and instead opted for a new approach of just making a whole long list of places that were recommended in various pamphets and brochures and then used google maps to find where they were in the city to finally plot a route and then hope that a taxi driver can understand my directions.

I woke late the next morning, already having dismiessed a trip to visit Lake Calima and all its water sports, as it required a 4 hour round trip, and was about to go and ask for a taxi when there was a knock at my door and the hostel receptionist informed me that she had managed to find a friend who she trusted that would act as a private taxi for me, escorting me around as many places as I wished to visit for as long as it took.

Although not perfect, as he was not an attractive female who spoke fluent English, I followed the arguement that beggars cant be choosers, and to be fair he was a good driver, knew the location of all the places that I had marked and was sociable enough chatting to me in Spanish for the duration, even taking a few of his own snaps and entering one of the museums instead of just sitting and waiting in his car.

One of the good things about travelling to Colombia is that it is a place that is not yet totally spoilt by tourists and tourism alike, and so it is still possible to be the only gringo within eye sight, and this gives you a bit of a feeling of experiencing something genuine and unique.

A good thing about travelling off season is that there are even less foreigners around than normal, so the queues to get in places are much shorter, if they exist at all.

However, one of the bad things about travelling off season is that during the off-season many of the places you might like to visit are closed for either renovation or just from lack of interest, and this is what happened to me time and again from my list of places I most liked to visit.

I did manage to visit Cristo Rey, which is a huge statue of Jesus, much like the big dude ( Christ the Redeemer ) in Rio de Janeiro, and similarly it is high on the mountain top with an excellent view of the city and the surrounding mountain ranges, plus it has the benefit of being bedecked in a whole carpet of lights that are switched on at night to make it visible 24/7.

It was also a good opportunity to see the difference in North Cali, which was big sky scrapers and commerical districts, and South Cali, which was all residential housing and looked very flat and uninteresting by comparison, with Cali's Large Bull Ring and Football Stadium set somwhere just outside of the centre.

After a few hours, a few soft drinks and yet another closed place, I suggested that we just head on back to my hostel as I was beginning to lose heart when he said that we had just one last place to visit that was central to where we were an it wouldn't take too long, so I agreed.

In the car we were just coming up to a nice statue sitting in an ideal slocation for a snap, and so natually I got my camera out and took a piccy, without noticing that there were cops doing "random" checks just next to it. As soon as they caught the flash I realised my error, as they then pulled us over and we were subjected to a random check, which included checking out the entire car, soft body search and investigation of our documents and passport.

Of course we didn't have anything for them to find, being the innocent tourist and local guide that we were, so eventually they let us go and with typical bad luck the place was also closed, so we barely got out of the car before heading off back to my hostel, the half day pseudo taxi / guide costing me 50,000 PES.

The heat during the middle of the day must have been in the early or mid 30's and so it was a welcome relief to get back to the hostel and crash out of a few hours with the rooms small fan washing waves of cool air over my back and face.

When I came out of my room a little later I was surprised to hear an English voice, though with a definite accent and I came face to face with a huge Danish Biker, who surprisingly enough was not a guest but the owner, having moved here a few months ago. It turned out that he was very much the seasoned biker traveller, and being as pale as me was still a gringo and had plenty of stories to tell to prove it.

It must have been his biker roots calling, as an hour later a Canadian couple and an American came in and were all talking bikes, good rides and leathers, and so all of a sudden I was back amoung English speaking people, though none from the UK, and we all shared a few stories and advice of past travels as we were all heading off to different parts of South America and for different reasons.

Much of the time we were politley grilling Mikkel, a former small Record Label Owner and many times biker, who had been to over 210 cities in 69 countries, mostly solo on his bike, but now he had reason to partly settle down due to recent marriage to his Columbian wife and their first baby who was born only yesterday.

After visting the city of Cali a couple of times he did some research and found that it was lacking in international hostels, mainly due to the poor image that Colombia is still suffering under, and so he saw his opportunity and after opening the first one a few months ago already has plans to open a second, a motorcycle rental company and a mini tour agency if things go well.

He also had some typical horror shories of being chased down by cops, run ins with drug dealers, episodes of spiked drinks and such that made me almost glad that nothing too scary has happened to me thus far on my journey, but the thing that caught my attention most was his local knowledge and understanding of the city.

Although the Cali cartel has been smashed and the whole place is cleaning up its act, there are still many places where shops and businesses are nothing more than public fronts for drug barons to launder their money, and even places like a local McDonalds franschise and petrol station had been corrupted and then bust by the local authorities. This at least partly explained why there were so many pretty shop assistants just sitting around doing nothing with hugely overpriced items in an otherwise empty shopping centre.

He also explained that due to the already numerous number of love motels and spa's in the city limites, he had been almost forced to adopt a super strict 'no locals friends of guests allowed in the rooms at any time for any reason' policy, as being a gringo he suspected that he would be targetted more than most, and in fact the local authorities had indeed raided his hostel ( without success of course ) about 6 times in the first few weeks of it opening just on the off chance that he was running something shady and thus give them the opportunity to shake him down or more simply just close him down, whichever they like doing most at the time.

Slightly disapointed in Cali

Sigh ... Cali is not going so well.

It is very warm, peaceful, modern and beautiful and the staff in the hostel are very polite and friendly but it seems that the whole of Cali is not really set up for Western Tourists.

The can't organise breakfast unless given a days notice and despite my best efforts and using a translator they are unable to find me a decent map of the city, a tour guide that can take me around the city that speaks English or even tell me where their is a local tour or travel agency that can help me.

If my Colombian friends from London were here I would already be knee deep in great local food and mojito's, would have already been to a museum and discoteque last night and right now we would be on a bus right heading off to Lake Calima to try our hands at kite surfing, scuba diving or some other such fun activity.

As it is, I am pretty much stuck in my hostel and able to only visit the immediate area, risk getting very lost very quickly or my third option which is to write down a list of places I want to visit and take taxi cabs from one to the next the whole day long.

Option C I think is the best option to make the most of my time but it is far from ideal.

Oh well, bring on the suncream and here's to cheap taxi drivers, gotta love um!

Rest of the first day in Cali

After I had updated my blog I tried talking to the pleasant hotel receptionist / cleaner, about a few things in the city, however my vocabulary is limited and all too quickly I was in uncharted language and had to resort to trying to use the hostels laptop to translate back and forth for me.

As I have only got two full days in the city, and not having anything arranged for today meant that I was losing one of them as I speak, meant that I was keen to try and take the hostel up on their brochure offers of guides and sporting activities in the area.

Once I explained a bit about what I wanted, she asked that I come back after 7pm when the other receptionist would be there and he would be the main one to talk to about trips and tours.

Thus not wanting to waste the day I took off northward to where I had been told there was a large shopping mall that was modern, clean and might even have a cinema that showed films in their original language. I was not disappointed. The place was only ten minutes away and very easy to find from my hostel, it was clean, tidy, there were guards at all the entrances looking slightly bored and a few more wandering about the place making their presence seen but not felt by the shoppers.

A few fountains, some tasteful Christmas decorations and some very bizarre modern art statues all made the place feel very cosmopolitan and I spotted the cinema near the entrance almost before I even reached the front gates. As luck would have it the new James Bond movie was being shown at exactly the time I arrived and with just enough trailers for me to grab a soda and snickers before finding my seat in an almost empty theatre.

The film was great, just what you expect from a Bond film and you can tell that they are keeping with the darker mood of Casino Royale, much like the latest Batman films are more brooding and menacing that the light hearted, almost comedic, ones of the past.

After the film I took in the sights of the shopping mall, tried to buy a few movie and music DVD's but regrettably the selection was broad but few in numbers and in the end I just settled for sampling one of the nicest banana splits I have ever tasted, considering I was allowed to chose the ice cream and topping flavors ( yes in Spanish too, all thanks to the help of the labels above each ice cream tub ) and sat back to enjoy the last of the days sun.

One thing that did surprise me was that there was no travel agency or tour guide shop in the centre, as this would have been the ideal place to have one and would have meant that I could have booked up some trips here instead of hoping for some good news back at the hostel later tonight.

On my way back to my hostel I decided to take a detour along the more popular 6th avenue, as it was reputed to have many nice restaurants, bars and salsa halls, but I barely got 50 yards into it when I spotted a large supermarket and thought that this would be a great time and place to grab enough groceries to last me a few days, and once inside I soon realised that the choices here was staggering.

There was plenty of familiar western favourites to chose from as well as the local brands, and vegetables are vegetables the world over, so they were a doddle to purchase, and one nice feature was that there were loads of chairs and seats al around, especially at each till, so if you had to wait for the person in front to go through a trolley filled to capacity you could at least do it in some form of comfort.

Once I had my bag of goodies I retraced my steps, as I didn't want to get lost carrying a heavy bag of groceries, and quickly walked the 7 blocks back to my hostel, where I just had enough time to fix myself up a couple of sandwiches before the other receptionist arrives and I made good my earlier promise and once again attempted to book some tours for tomorrow.

The only problem was that despite their best efforts and the fact that many of the brochures were in English, the city guide this time of year was only in Spanish, unless I paid for two, one acting as a translator and all the amazing sporting activities mentioned were not actually in the city limits itself, but in the Lake Calima region, which is at least a two hour journey by bus north of Cali, and thus 4 hours of tomorrow would be used up travelling and it would leave me no time for the city tour, the museums or anything else.

Yet again I had fallen foul of not giving myself enough time to do all the things that I would have liked to do, but having hit the internet for at least two hours earlier in the day and last night I do not really blame myself for this one, as without booking an all inclusive holiday package there are precious few actual sites that let you book city tours that I could find in English, and a whole website in Spanish is hardly ideal for my purposes.

Thus it was that I asked the hostel staff to do their best to find things for me to do for the next two days and email it to me with prices, and then crossed my fingers that something good would present itself in the next forty eight hours.

Arrival and first morning in Cali

After a two hour long pitstop in Panama I was back on a flight from Tocumen Airport in Panama to Cali in Colombia, and right away I was amazed and surprised that the food they gave was no only edible but came with real metal knives and forks, not plastic flimsy things or utensils so blunt that they could not cut through butter if you put all your weight behind them.

I was a little confused however, as I checked my wrist compass the whole time and from Tocumen airport we seemed to be flying due North West the entire time, which could not possibly be correct and so I think that maybe there are big magnets in the front of the plane confusing my little compass.

The airport was pretty tight upon landing, they went through my luggage but only briefly, and I was a little disappointed that the airports facilities were only on the outgoing part of the terminal, and the inbound was non existent, as soon as I had cleared customs and retrieved my luggage I was out into the street late at night with no ATM's, Taxi firm, Information kiosk or other such device to cushion the shock of arriving in a foreign city.

I managed to avoid the pouncing taxi drivers by diving back upstairs to the International departure lounge, but you could tell that the place was emptying for the night as all the shops and restaurants were closed and I decided that this was not a very safe place to get my laptop out and start mucking around doing stuff. I should have go my cellphone out though, as once I got downstairs I found that there were no buses going into the city centre ( at least none that I could find ) and so I had to let one of the taxi hawkers lead me around and I always hate the feeling of helplessness.

I really do suggest to everyone not to arrive any later than 5pm in a foreign city if travelling by plane, that way the sky is never pitch black, there are always a few places still open ( thus possibly someone might speak your language ) and the chances of a bus or coach going to the city centre are still favourable, plus the added benefit of that it probably won't be too dangerous to grab a taxi to your hostel or hotel from where you leave the bus or coach.

Regrettably I was in no position to haggle for a good price, and they knew it, so despite my attempt at haggling I didn't manage to budge the price from 45,000 COP, which worked out to be around £12 for a half hour taxi ride, which is still cheap for England but here was a bit over the odds. However I sort of got revenge by paying in a mix of US / Ecuadorian dollars and COP's once I got out and while the driver was busy trying to work out what I gave him I made a calm dash for the safety of the hotel.

During the taxi ride I could not help but notice the large luminous sign of "Motel - Sex and Love" only about five minutes along the interstate from the Airport, and this was just the first, setting a trend and being a bold reminder of what Cali has now become famous for, after it's Salsa dancing fiesta's and former drugs cartel infamy.

Arriving at my hotel I was glad to be able to put my rucksack down and get a internet connection, but I was a pain that not only was there nothing good to watch on the TV but also that the hotel porter / receptionist only spoke Spanish.

In an unusual display of pure michief I decided to casually ask if women were allowed in the rooms and his only reply was to pause for the briefest of moments before nodding and saying yes for a price, as he greedily rubbed his fingers together in the universal language of "give me a tip to look the other way and its not problem".

Of course I had no intention of doing so, I was just curious as to if all the internet rumours about Cali were true, most of which I now feel are fairly accurate, and in fact I also think that had I known enough Spanish I could probably have him russle me up a chica, but I was just glad for the double safety and security of a private room and the chance to regroup with the internet for the days to come.

The next morning I read an email that my friend here was out of town and would not be back til Thursday, so it looked as if this would be a city that I am to visit solo, my first since leaving Cusco in Peru and I had sort of taken for granted that I would have at least one friendly local face that could understand me, so this was a small set back and a lesson not to take things for granted.

What was a bigger disappointment was that the hotel I was staying in had no city of tour information free for its guests, they even charged me 1,000 COP for a city map, so I was positive that my decision to move to a cheaper but more centrally located and international hostel was a wise idea, as in hostels you almost always get freebies and there is a chance that perhaps here someone would be able to speak English.

The taxi from one hostel to the other was by meter and cost 5,000 COP, so perhaps the nighttime taxi was not such a complete rip off as I first thought, and I saw plenty of nice western style places to eat and quite a few discotheques and salsa halls which would be a good place to visit later if I had someone to go with, translate for me and of course to watch my back.

I am so very glad that I took Spanish classes back in the UK and have tried to practice it here as much as possible, as the receptionist in the hostel was also unable to speak or understand any English and yet I was able to check in, get information about local tours ( or lack thereof ) and find out the nearest big shopping centre and how to get there.

I also understood enough at the last hotel to have a brief conversation as to why I was leaving after only one night instead of the three that I had originally booked, and concochted up a story that I had a friend who was waiting for me and preferred this other hotel.

My verbal skills are still far from fluent and my vocabulary is fairly limited, but I can tell that I have made a big improvement from where I was at six months ago and almost everyhere I go I am comlimented on my clear pronounciation, so I am more than ever determined that when I return to the UK I will once again take up my study books and go at it with a renewed interest.

The hostel is in a nice Salsa Club dominated area of the city, and I think that I will enjoy a wander while it is still the middle of the day, grab a bite to eat, take a few piccies and see if there is anything on at the local cinema, and then when it starts to get dark I will return and book early tours for the morning. I might even have a stab at a half day rappelling, bungee jumping or paragliding as I spotted a flier in the hostel that offered all these things, so it just depends on the price and if anyone on the tour speaks enough English for me to be able to do it safely.