Leaving Manizales

I had half planned to visit the nearby coffee plantation early in the morning and then get back in time to check out and get to the airport, but by the time that I was properly up and awake I was too late for the three hour round trip and visit.

Instead I made got up, dressed and went down to the breakfast table where I made my first solo properly cooked breakfast, which was scrambled eggs and toast, although I put in too much milk and had to take a third egg instead of the two that we were allowed.

Over breakfast I marvelled at the genuis of having a large breakfast table in a hostel as it encouraged people to sit together and talk, and it was here than I got chatting to a very interesting girl from eastern europe whose parents moved to Germany when she was young and through travel and education could speak several languages.

She had been travelling and trying to do volunteer work, much as I had planned to do at the very start of my trip, and as soon as the rain and the flooding of the area had occured she had placed a call to the local red cross agent offering her help, to which the guy said that he would visit the hostel to talk to her around 9am. As I had also told myself that I would try to help when I could, I decided to wait around and see what jobs could be done either here or in Bogota as that was my next stop, however it would appear that the locals did not require any foreign help as the guy from the red cross again called the hostel around 10am to say that the situation was all now under control but if anything did crop up he would contat again in a day or two.

It was a little bit dissapointed not to be able to help, as not only would it be a great experience and something that I had said that I wanted to do before I started but had not yet had a chance to do. After this bit of news we sat around and chatted for a few hours ti lit was time for my flight, along with the hostel owner and by the time that I left I was passing my card out and hugs all round, so much more like saying farewell to friends than simply goodbye to a place where I was staying, and this I believe is the biggest bonus of staying in a hostel.

On the way to the airport I thought hard about possibly running a hostel as a buisness and where would the best place be, and yet when I got to the airport all I wanted to do was scream and find someone that spoke English.

Manizales airport was tiny ( being only suitable for national flights ), with only about 5 check in desks, one x-ray machine and one mixed arrival and departure gate. As it was only one gate it was easy to find but it didnt have any screen projects saying when things were arrving or departing and so I had to listen and then just walk over to the departure gate, only to find that my flight was delayed.

An hour later and the same thing happened, and eventualy my flight that should have left at 12:25 in the end left 2 hours late and I had gone from optomistic to frustrated to downright aggresive and if they had delayed my flight again I would have gone up and attempted to demand my money back, plus my luggage, and I have no idea how I would have managed that in the little Spanish that I know.

Arriving in Bogota was fine, except that it was a holiday Monday, and even though Bogota is the capital city, in South America on a holiday you will find only about 10% of the bars, restaurants, clubs, etc open, and thus my night was going to be long and fairly uneventful. The taxi rank at the airport had its own desk where you would get a fixed price in advance and a full direction to give the taxi driver, so there is no chance of being stiffed and little chance to get lost until you arrive at your destination.

Earlier in the week I had decided to change my lodgings to a hotel, as I wanted to be able to invite friends back after a day aorund the city, especially as it is raining a lot and cold at nights, and I had become increasingly frustrated by smal hostels refusing to allow friends of guests inside or into the rooms for security reasons.

I managed to check in, read through the whole sheet of warning and city dangers that did nothing to reassure me and as soon as I got to my room I checked to see if I could get a wifi signal in my room, and as I could not I quickly contacted the reception and asked to be moved to one that did, even though the final one was a fraction smaller and closer to the renovatoin works that were going on, as thus why the price was affordable.

A few hours later I met up with my friend N' and before she even came into my room she said that my hotel was in a very dangerous part of the city, being the central downtown which was an area full of drugs addicts, prostitutes and thieves. In fact, she told me, she had had her cellphone stolen there only last week and her mother had her purse pick pocketted the week before, all of which did nothing to put me at ease in a city that I had not been in for almost a year, and never to this part of.

After the hotel warnings, this further unsettled me, so together we went got a taxi and went to grab a bite to eat and see some of the city, although as I said, being a holiday Monday, all we could really do is see the outsides of places and not actually get in anywhere. Together we went around a shopping mall, saw the many Christmas decorations and took a few photos.

In an effort to find a more suitable hotel in a safer area we asked the taxi driver to take us to a cheap alternative nearby, but at over 600,000 pesos for one nights stay, I calculated that even if I was robbed of everything I would still lose less than the cost of staying in this hotel for 4 nights, and without even a tour I decided that I would prefer to take my chances where I was currently checked into, and just be extra cautious to not go out alone late at night with anything of value.

N' had to be up early the next day for her studies and work so I said goodbye and hoped that we could meet up again before I left at the end of the weekend.

A day and a half in Manizales

After the failed aborted attempt to visit the Therman Spa's I returned to the hostel and decided to kill til my friend arrived by watching a movie.

The hostel owner had, a young Colombian woman, was more than eager to watch a movie as well as it was something that she rarely got to do normally, but with the rain coming down in buckets it was not suitable to go out and so it was not really a waste of time at all. We decided to watch the Lord of the Rings film, startig with the first one and we never expected to get very far as my friend was due to arrive any moment, however it didn't quite end up the way we planned.

I ordered in a pizza and a bottle of coke, thinking that my friend would be here soon, but after about five hours she sent me an email saying that she had a family emergency at home and could not make it, so we finished the first movie and began to watch the second in the trilogy.

The weather outside had turned worse if anything, and it was so dark and thundering that it was almost adding its own sound affects to the movie, but luckily the hostel was fairly empty so there was not too many comings and going to interrupt the movie. As I am a keen Tolkien fan, and the owner had never read the books, she found a few things puzzling so I was happy to explain a few things to her and ended up almost talking over half of it interpretting the movie from the book and going into detail on things that the film just showed but often never bothered trying to explain.

As my friend was not coming over and the weather was just worsening by the minute, the hostel owner and I saw no reason to stop at the end of the second film and just continued to eat our way thorugh the pizza and chatting to the end of the third, by this time we were sitting next to each other on the sofa underneath a thick throw to keep out the chill and chatting like old friends.

By the time we had reached the end of the third it was time for bed, but she suggeted that I wake up early and go to the coffee plantation nearby in the morning.

When I woke up next morning it was already gone 9am and I had pretty much decided that as the weather had been so bad, in case of further rain during today, I would rather do the city centre while the dry weather held and possibly leave the coffee plantation til the following morning, or this afternoon depending on how I felt after the morning.

After checking my emails I arranged to go visit the city centre, and possibly because she had nothing better to do and partly because of the movie fest of last night, the hostel owner offered to come with me and for the day we were again more like friends that guest and hotelier.

We swung by the tourist informatoin office where she picked up for me enough maps, leaflets and brouchers for me to do a pretty detailed guide of the region then and there, did a tour of the city centre walking its entire length, and then stopping for a great meal that was very reasonably priced and only suffered from a slight poor service of the waiter who seemed to forget my drinks order.

After the tour, and taking plenty of photos, we popped across to where they locals were putting on a cross between a circus show and a pantomime, and in a rare change of pace they had actually started earlier than advertised in order to beat the worst of the bad weather, and thus we got there just a fraction after half way through. The costumes were simple and the routines simple at times, but I had to take my hat off to the acrobats who performed without nets of safety wires and would run up and down poles as part of the routine.

As we had arrived midway we only saw about half an hours worth, but I was glad to have come and impressed with the finale which was extremely simple but terrific to watch, in that the guy walked / climbed unaided to the top of a pole turned himself upside down and then hanging on by his entwined legs spread his arms out wide and then relaxed his leg muscles sending him plummeting down to earth, only to tighten them at the last spilt second, coming to a sudden stop less than a foot from the ground.

I had my heart in my mouth just watching it, and the fact that if he had mistimed it a fraction of a second too late he would have hit the ground headfirst, surely fracturing his spine and giving him instant brain damage if he had survived at all.

Once the show was over we got a taxi back, which was just a few blocks back and as the rain had started up again we just did a super fast tour of the nearby shopping mall, bought ourselves a couple of coffees and then walked the last two blocks back to the hostel.

During the day I had explained to her that I was hopefully going to write a travel book upon my return, and she said that one of the guys from Lonely Planet who had done the report of this part of Colombia had met her a few times and used her as a local expert of Medellin, frequently still emailing her from time to time to ask questions, to which she would always happily reply as she is eager to show the best of Colombia.

I was impressed with her background knowledge and eagerness to help, even going above and beyong anything I had experienced thus far on my trip, and by the end of my day with her I was having to bite my lip and remind myself that I don't have enough money to invest in her new venutre, a joint hostel and tour company, although if I do manage to make a success of my writing career I will not hesistate to come back and offer to become a backer and with her drive and experience I cannot see it being anything but a huge success.

Once we got back to the hostel we flicked on the news which was sadly full of news reports that were upsetting and distressing.

Apart from the stories of forest fires in California was the much much closer to home news on the damage caused by the flooding and mountain landslides, as so much rain had fallen the previous night two nights that entire sections of mountain had just slipped down and tragically there were a number of deaths and further loss of power and water to some homes. I also saw that in Poblado, the region of Medellin where I was staying the other day, had experienced an even worse tragedy as fifteen houses had been flattened like matchboxes under the weight of shifting earth from above, killing 2 instantly with another 10 being unaccounted for at the time of the news report.

As the rain had once again started to come down hard outside, I decided that I would not be going out trying to test out the local clubs and bars, so instead just typed up my notes of the day and retired early to bed.

A rainy day in Manizales

Did I mention that last night it rained ... well this is the rainy season, and so it did more than drizzle and I was to find out to my cost just how much the next day, and why few people visit Colombia during the rainy season.

I woke up early enough in the morning to check out when my friends could meet me before I decided to take a daytrip in the centre of town, and I found out that she would be busy til the early afternoon, so I had time to touch up my photos and catch up on the blogging.

However my plans changed when an English lady, who is volunteer working in an Orphanage in Medellin, came down to breakfast and said that she was on her own and just off to visit the local thermal spa's in the area before dashing off to a nearby Coffee plantation to get some discount Christmas presents, as well as the experience of course.

Although I doubted I would have time for it all, the thermal spa's sounded tempting and so in order to split the taxi fare, we agreed to go together, borrowe a couple of towels from the hostel and set off.

Did I mention it rained, well I found out that it had rained almost the entire night and caused a lot of flooding and landslides in the area, so much so that the main road to Bogota was blocked and plenty of huge rocks and overhanging trees had their roots slip out from under them and cover entire lanes of the roads going up high into the mountain.

Being at 2000 above sea level,and raining, the weather was cold so we had both wrapped up warm, but after half an hour stuck in traffic filtering through bottle neck after bottle neck we soon realised that the ten minute taxi ride to the thermal spa's was going seriously pear shaped.

After an hour we were glad that the taxi meter was running more on distance than on time, so it had only clocked up to 13,000 pesos, though we were told it would be only around 8,000 when we left, and we werent even there, so we started asking questions of our taxi driver. We eventually passed a hotspot where all the big buses were being diverted down a hill ( to avoid an obvious impassable road ) and found it amusing that the meter and a half frontal clearance that they had from the front wheel was not enough to let them go down the hill without damaging their fenders.

We never actually reached our objective as no matter how close we got the road would always be blocked off, and the though of walking across and around muddy slopes just didn't appeal to either of us, so we turned around and headed back into town, 33,000 pesos and a few hours lighter, but much wiser for it and I already knew that I would have to but a flight to Bogota as with the weather forcasting more heavy rain for the next week it would be sods law that the roads would be still blocked when I would need them in a few days. I only hope that the road to the airport isn't affected or else I really will be stuck.

I have to admit that I spotted lots of work being done to rectify and remove the obstrctions, but what I found most bizarre is that at least half the road works were of a normal nature, so heaven knows why they decided to do normal road works during the rainy season, as it just turned a bad situation into an absolute nightmare.

When I got back to my hostel I found that the water in the whole of the town was also out, from damaged pipes and yet more mud slides, and looking out of my hostel window I have doubts about not only my visiting much during my stay in Manizales but also of the safety of the small wooden houses that I had spotted earlier perched dangerously on the side of hills and mountains.

We split the taxi fare as fair as possible as she jumped out near the city centre and I had a chance to take a few quick piccies before I got back.

As boring as it may be, the safest bet might be to invite my friends over to the hostel, get some pizza or whatever delivered and just stay in watchinig movies, as I haven't got enough strong waterproofs to protect me for a full weeks solid rain and I don't want to be carrying around wet clothes for days as they are twice as heavy and I am already having second thoughts about continuing to travel with my mini dictionary and other books that I have bought recently.

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.