Colombiana Moderna

After spending 4 nights in Baranquilla we were ready to continue exploring our new love, Colombia. Up until this point our greatest surprise here has been the people. So warm, so welcoming, and just so genuinely nice. Up in the Caribbean especially, it´s just so hot no one has any energy to be mean. The culture has so much life and heart and love that there´s little room for anger or negativity.

We took a short shuttle back to Cartagena to fetch the rest of our luggage that we had locked up happily at our hostel during Carnaval and caught a night bus to Medillin at 9:30pm. We were ready for the 13 hour journey south, bringing our sweatshirts and sleeping bags on the bus, learning from our previous mistakes. This is where money in Colombia comes in as the one downside. Things are more expensive here than in any other country we´ve been to. Buses especially. This bus cost us 108.000 COP, roughly 60 bucks! Huh?? But because Colombia is Colombia, and we seem to think they´re overcompensating for their reputation, they have tons of road checkpoints throughout the country, random bag checks and searches, and high security patrolling. And we are more than happy that they have this. However, it comes at a cost for locals and tourists alike. The bus was very comfortable, plenty of leg room, and not the artic cold that we were anticipating (although the AC was still blasting way more than it needed to be).

We arrived an hour early into the Medillin bus terminal, which was sleek and modern just like their Metro system. Beautiful, efficient, and oh so clean! It put the NYC subway to shame, we must admit. We opted to take the train to our hostel that was just a short walk from a major station in town. It took us no time at all to get comfortable on the metro, feeling right at home on mass transit. This is by far the biggest city we´ve been to yet. It´s enormous! Nestled in a large valley it spreads outward and up among rolling hills and mountains, home to more than 3.5 million people. It was exciting to be there.

We got to our hostel, the Black Sheep, New Zealand owned, in a well-to-do neighborhood that looked more like L.A. than Colombia. We settled into our dorm room and set out for the day. Our first stop was the Metro Cable system that is a free transfer from the Metro onto one of two cable lines that connect the distant barrios of the city with the center, an itiative from the Mayor to provide more opportunities to the people of these communities. They also provide the optimal views of the city from high atop the mountains, seeing just how vast the metropolis is.

We than decided to go to Museo de Antioquia located on Plaza de Botero. This is our first official visit to a legit art museum. So excited!! Botero is a famous Colombian artist who has donated hundreds of pieces of his work to the city to the point that they needed to open the museum to host his many works, in addition to a great variety and selection of others. We arrived just as the sky opened up to pour so we were happy to take shelter for a few hours. Botero´s style incorporates typical Colombian scenes with his asthetic of extremely rounded, exaggerated figures in paintings, sketches and sculptures.

After a few hours we decided we needed some street meat to tie us over until dinner. We had a nice little selection from a woman outside the train and then decided to head back to the hostel. We were so happy to have our first hot shower since Honduras!! We had forgotten what it was like, and how clean you can actually get with hot water. We had gotten so accustomed to not even asking that we were pleasantly surprised! We chilled at the hostel for a while, watched a movie, used internet, and then went for chicken burgers at a place close by. It was Wednesday night but we had heard the the Medillin night scene was good, not realizing that in pretty much every place this means only on weekends. We checked out Zona Rosa which was packed to the brim with bars and discos that we all totally empty! Not only that, but the beers that usually cost about 1.300 COP cost more than double that here. We walked around and made sure we weren´t missing anything not worth missing, and circled around back to the hostel where we were able to catch the end of Love Actually and drink an appropriately priced Aguila on the couch.

Some point during that night Sophie got 100.000 COP stolen out of her backpack. But these were nice hostel thieves, only taking the two 50.000 notes and leaving the 20s and 10s. This was the only time the money wasn´t in a locker, so lesson learned that didn´t need to be learned. Bummer for sure tho. The next morning after we realized this, we decided to just shake it off and be glad that´s the only thing and instance of theft we´ve experienced. We wanted to get down to Manizales that night, about 5 hours from Medillin, so we just took the metro and bus to a cemetary east of town. This is where Pablo Escobar is buried and we felt like being super tourists for just an hour. But we didn´t pay 40.000 to go on a tour like others usually do. We ventured on our own, hanging our heads down low when we had to admit where we were going and for what reason. But we had a nice stroll around the cemetary and saw the tomb of an extremely important cultural figure in not just Medillin, but Colombia.

Those flowers were already there, we weren´t paying tribute to the guy. We sat and wondered for a while if the reasons why Colombia´s economy is so strong and the people live so well could be attributed to Don Pablo.
We didn´t spend a whole lot of time in Medillin (2 days and one night), but we were more anxious to get down into Zona Cafetera than to stick around longer. We got a minivan from Medillin to Manizales. Little did we know the first 2 1/2 hours of the trip are on the most winding, curving roads, obviously cliff side, only exacerbated by a wild driver who took great pleasure in seeing our bobbling heads through the rear view mirror. Kat looked like a few shades of green and yellow during this time as she practiced lamaz breathing and moaning to keep herself from vomitting or screaming in agony. It didn´t help when we saw this either:

 They´re just chilling there!

But it did when we saw the scenery, so breathtaking, green and lush that the stomach pangs dissapated.

We arrived in Manizales in time to learn that the volcano en Nevado Del Ruiz was active and no one was permitted to hike it. You could take a hike around in the area and possibly get views of the volcano, but anything else was out of the question. Darn! We decided to think about what we wanted to do over dinner, knowing that we did have other options. We stumbled upon a place that served up cheap hot dogs and was blasting reggae as the young staff renovated the inside that they were turning into a cool lounge/bar. They were awesome, and hung out with us as we all talked about music and beautiful places that we needed to go to when in the area. Our conversation made us all break into hysterical laughter because of our great miscommunications, and attempts on either side to describe something in the other´s language. We realized that often we use the phrase "pequenos cosas" (small things) to refer to just about everything. Por exemplo, leaves (ojas) are "los pequenos cosas en los arboles", which when translated into English just sounds too funny. Also, we use the phrase, "Es possible" when asking for something or when we´re thinking about doing something. Por exemplo "Es possible hay mas salsa picante?" o "Es possible vamos a salir esta noche". We´ve come to really appreciate people who speak broken English because of how funny our Spanish sounds sometimes. Try describing who the smurfs are in Spanish! It´s fun!

Emma had given us a solid recommendation for a place she went to with a friend for a week nearby, called Salento. We had planned to go there either way, so we thought it´d be best to go a day early and really explore the area.