Colombia Part 8: Medellin

Hmm have not written on here for a while. I think I mentioned the bus driving straight past Rio Claro. Bastards. They suggested we hike back. We suggested they take a hike and took the now very cheap bus to Medellin (as we only paid for halfway). Apparently in between my sleeping (travel narcolepsy having struck in) there was some beautiful scenery. Will probably try and visit these places with Kelvin when he gets over here, so maybe will stay awake and comment more on this scenery. Then again I will most likely take a night bus or sleep anyway. Such is the way I travel. Nothing much seems to have happened this day. I remember we took the tube (sky train) in Medellin. Its the best bit of publci transport in Colombia. Other cities should take note, especially Bogota and its fabled Metrobus. That thing makes London buses look quick and efficient. It is a lovely colour of red though. We got lost in the posh neighbourhood near the hostel and someone eventualy directed us to the correct place. There appears to be something at my left elbow that is preventing me typing. Also I went for a run at 4000m altitude today so am a little woosey. I had some messages to attend to when I got into Medellin and then both Dom and I passed out from the excesses of Bogota. It was going to be fast paced from now on and so we had to rest.

Well I thought it was going to be fast paced, but we seem to have slumped back into our old habits. Ah first person, when I am writing nearly a month later. Tricky eh. We went to the supermarket in the morning and I decided to blow some pesos refitting my retrograde wardrobe that had not had any new additions (aside from free t-shirts) since New York City. I bought some jeans to replace the ones I left in San Gil, some socks (always badly needed with my corrosive feet) and a rain coat. Well it was not really a rain coat. It was more a chav shell suit with free trousers. Despite the Liverpudlian connotations I have become fond of these trousers. Tehy are very comfortable. I hated them at first. I probably would not wear them in England (and I don't even mind what people say), but fuck me are they comfortable. I could probably wear them until the day of judgment. This new found love was only tempered by the fact that they were the self same pair of trousers being worn by a tramp that night on the streets of Medellin. Derelicte fashion indeed. We then came back and watched the second leg of Chelsea v Barcelona. Man Chelsea were robbed and unlucky, but Dom was ecstatic with the last minute equaliser (de facto winner). Then it pissed down with rain. The sky was evidently a Chelsea fan and felt the need to weep. This was the last time I wrote anything and I believe it was both parts of Bogota. Apparently trying to listen to I'm on Fire by Bruce Springsteen is an infraction of this computers terms. Well it is a riskee song, but seriously. And someone has a giant microphone outside trying to sell Orange Juice. I hate Ecuador, but more on that later. We went out into Zona Rosa that night when the rain eased off and it was dead so we played pool. I flukily won 5-4. This will become a trend. We also looked up the weather forecasts for the next 5 days. Hmm complete thunderstorms. Awesome for paragliding we thought. It seems the city of eternal spring, was imitating England and that's not a great spring to aspire to. As you see, that day was full guns blazing.

The next morning we got up and there was a glimmer of sunshine. We dashed to the paragliding location. The closer we got the more I shit myself. Dammit this is in 'The Book' (Not the Bible but the Lonely Planet Adventure Travel Book), but my vertigo was not going to let it go easily. The girl at the paragliding place was stunning (as was the starter on the hill) and they made us fill in a disclaimer in advance. This described the various ways you can die from paragliding and seemed to give the impression that death was all but imminent. To those who knew I was going and had noticed I had written nothing since, perhaps they believed death had occured. Anyway this document was more scary than anything I have actually 'done' and helped my mood no end. We ascended with a sort of parachute and two grinning Colombian guys to the top of a very high hill. I was to go first. Bugger. My vertigo had improved to the point where I believe I can do anything I see someone else do and not die (this excepts base jumping which is insane and every famous basejumper has died. Still its in the book, but will be last when I am grey and almost dead. As will be walking the Darien Gap). Yet I was to go first. What was my instruction. See that huge cliff edge. Just run towards that. Como? Are you serious? Are you nuts? Can I back out of this? The instruction came 'And run'. Bollocks. Ok to hell with it. If its my time, its my time. I tried not to think of the various different ways the chute can collapse from air currents and the fifteen different ways to die and I ran. And I stopped. Parachute was dragging. We ran again. At this point I would like to say that you sit in a chair in front of the pilot on his chair. They are made of canvass like an old grannies shopping back. Strapped to this is a large parachute laid out like a deflated bouncy castle. This is what I put my faith in. I wondered if we fall off the cliff before it takes hold. Still we ran. I wondered if it always opened. Still we ran. I figured the first thing in 'The Book' in South America may kill me. Still we ran. This took place over the space of around 3 seconds. Still we ran. And then we lifted off. I sat down on the grannies shopping basket and it held. We soared off the cliff and the parachute held. Hmm actually this stuff is quite easy. Then you have no choice, but to trust the pilot and we yapped in Spanish while we soared over Medellin. Once the fear is passed, the area beyond holds no fear. That is usually the case for most things. FDR was very right when he said 'The only thing we have to fear is fear itself'. That and heights of course. Hmm this was much easier than I anticipated and we soared like a bird amongst the birds. I am using soared a lot. Perhaps I should use glide because we were paragliding, but then again you never really glide. You float, swoop up and swoop down again as you go from side to side amongst the thermals. Yes swoop is the word. It is a fitting word. The flight was very relaxing and you could almost fall asleep on that grannies bag attached to a bouncy castle. The views of Medellin were short and I was told the flight would be shorter than normal (fifteen minutes as opposed to twenty five) because the thunderstorm had rendered the thermals cold. When it comes to landing you end up doing spiral after spiral as you plunge to the ground like a falling pirate ship from a theme park. You could get quite dizzy. Indeed Dom got motion sickness from his one. I was told to lift up my legs. How exactly do you land one of these things? My Spanish was not good enough. It seems you swoop in fast and land on your arse with your legs in the air. Then you skid along. Its kind of like the stop at the bottom of those spiral slides when you are a kid and whizz down them on sackcloths. In fact it is identical to that. The spirals, the sackcloth/gtrannies bag and the arse grinding landing. And just like those slides, the first thing you wanted to do was go back up again. Will definitely do this again. I have even more respect for Yankee Chris though and his ability to climb a mountain and then hurl himself off into unknown thermals that have never been tested before. Maybe he can do it because he does not have to sign one of those disclaimers and is unaware of the fifteen ways his parachute can collapse. We chatted with the guys for bit about the best bars in the city etc and then got the sky train back to town.

Dom stayed in and I decided I wanted to see some of the town. He was feeling sick you see. So I took the sky train back in. Medellin had seemed awfully stale and clean cut in the suburbs. The centre was a bit edgier. Kind of like the city level of edgy equivalent to a boy band member getting a piercing. Its a start. I went to the Museo De Antioquia. Outside are battalions of fat things in statue form. These are Boteros famous statues. He still only makes fat versions of normal things. He is still very famous. He is still very cack. I got a ticket for the museum (there were some strange gringos doing techno yoga outside, but I thought it best not to inquire further) and was informed Botero's stuff was on the top floor. Oh great. I knew which floor was least important and would be visited last. While I looked at some weird exhibitions of contemporary South American art in the basement, two in the afternoonm struck and like clockwork the heavens opened. When I entered the sun was blistering, when I left I needed a boat. With the exception of Botero's fat rubbish, the rest of the gallery was really good (best I have seen for a while) and the mural in the top floor was class. It was by a Colombian I forget the name of. It seems there are many talented Colombian artists. Yet none of them represent fat things so they are not famous. I have been reading Twain's 'Innocents Abroad' and he talks about how the Renaissance paintings appeared better than the old masters to him, but he was rubbished for it. He said there are only so many religious paintings of monks looking pensive, sorrowful, elated and many other emotions that one can bear. I agree. I hate those paintings too and I am sure he would be in complete agreement with me that one fat painting is more than enough. Afterwards I went to the modern art gallery in the rain. Rain coat works. Was good to know. They had a funky exhibition with photographs of people being killed by various things like cakes, sweets of some kind and all other sickly addictions. Was funnier than I can describe, because I did not take good notes and its been too long since writing. It seemed a cool student hangout place and I made a note to come back to the bar for drinks. Then I walked through a campus, over a bridge with apparently 'burning tramps'. I don't remember any tramps on fire, so I assume they were burning something. A vile smell assaults my nose from memory and now the picture is more complete. I walked all over the city to get a better idea and then headed back to organise a pub crawl of the student district. This did not happen. Fellow travellers were gypos and they were all English, so naturally like Bocas Del Toro we bought rum and coke from a supermarket and got hammered in the hostel. Well I was not hammered then, but the second bottle in the first bar pushed me over the edge. I have put 'Cultural Exchange?'. No idea what the hell I meant there. Probably wrote it after the second bottle of rum. I finished Mark Twain's 'Roughin It' then as well. Great book. If I could only write travel writing half as good as that man. Some of the English young kids had thought the restaurants had been selling dog, because they saw 'perro' on a menu. Now hot dog in Spanish is 'perro caliente' and they shorten it sometimes. They started barking at the woman to check if it was dog. Their bark was definitely stronger than their brain. It was fun to get hammered with some English people and Predator was on in the film room as well. Fuck yeah. Predator. That confirmed Colombia's status as a class country. Was just a shame the usual crew was not there. My jokes were lost on this crowd though, which was a disappointment amongst the English. They were either too slow in the head or too coked up to appreciate them. After the second bottle of rum, I believe we went to a bar called Blu, where some locals wanted to dance with us and take us on to some club, but I was way too hammered and found my own way back to find the other English smoking joints in the garden. When in Rome. Ah I have just turned the page and realised that was not all. I was dancing in the club with a poel. Not the kind for pole dancing nor our friends from Eastern Europe, but the kind that keep the roof on. I believe soem Colombian girl asked me what I was doing and I said dancing with a pole. She said come dance with me I think. I said she had a boyfriend and carried on dancing with the pole. We also had to cancel some taxis because we were going to go to a club called Vinecure. Its apparently an odd place with a clothing optional room and we never did make it there. Have to go with Kelvin. Hmm I think that just about wraps that up. Oh yeah we cancelled them beacuse some people were too gypo for entrance fees.

The next day I got up late. Wonder why. We were too late to go to El Penol. Though we would not have been I think, having been there since. I decided to cook my patented Chinese Pork and Cabbage Soup. We needed soy. We had none. English girl said we could use some of hers if she copuld have some food. I only remembered too laet I needed all the soy bottle and we could not find her once it was cooked. Not as good as home, but good enough. We replaced the soy with a new bottle and an apology. Seemingly we did not much that day and then Dom and I went to drink at the Modern Art Gallery. The bar is awesome, the staff are fine in all respects and the students just mill about on the streets drinking. I almost wrote sidewalk there. Dammit I can't speak real English anymore. Every English person insists I don't have an English accent anymore. Quite a few people recently thought I was Irish mainly, Russian or German. The Spanish girl in our hostel thought I was American. And when Dom rang up Manizales hospital after this they said to him 'Ah yeah you were with the Irish guy'. And they have my damn passport on record. Oh well. Maybe I will just answer I am from nowhere now. The thunderstorm struck again and scattered the students away from the bar they did not want to pay to drink in. Shame. We were pinned in so drank many rounds in the good company. Good soundtrack as well. They were playing Amelie when I was in there first. Writing about Colombian nightlife makes me sad a little, because I am in Ecuador and there is none to write home about. We decided to get a taxi to the legendary Medellin nightspot Mangos. Fuck I hate Lonely Planet. The taxi driver and the subsequent one know nothing about their city and can't find the destinations. Luckily we double check. Mangos is a monstrosity. Its like Midnight Rodeo without the fun. Its a wild west theme, everything is decked out kitsch and tacky. There specialty is there dwarf waiters and dancers apparently. I believe its the ability to strip a man of his money at three bar bills. You pay $6 to enter and a beer is $4.40. Dom found that out to his cost. Normally in Colombia they are $0.80 more or less. We sat at a table and watched all the young women/prostitutes (they weer too surgically enhanced to tell for certain) with their old, fat men. I am assuming the good looking young girl in front of us with the fat, grey haired gringo in front of us was attracted to him for his rolling flab. Then the waiter informed us that to sit at a table you have to buy a bottle of spirits. Ah ok how much? 290,000 pesos. Again HOW MUCH? but with a different intonation. Thats around $120. Hmm not bad. You pay to enter, but unless you mortgage your holiday you can't sit down. You must sit at the bar in the middle. I assume this is like a public stocks in Medellin. It puts the poor people in their place (front of view for the amusement of the house) and lets the women/prostitutes know who is not worth their time. This is a salsa club. No one dance. Noone. They just stare at people from their tables. Mind you if I paid that much for a table I would not want to leave it either, in case it got stolen. That bottle of whisky was the price of three prostitutes by the way. No wonder most of the old men were outnumbered. Apparently this is where the best looking women in Medellin go. Not quite. Its where the ones with the best bodies money can buy and the most mangled faces money can destroy go. Why on earth stunning Colombian girls have surgery done to them to effectively make them look like groptesque walking dolls is anyones idea, but its done. We missed the student and art district. That was real. This was pabntomime. Exhorbitantly priced pantomime. I think it is the reason why we skipped Viencure even though we wanted to go. Its a poser joint and makes no apologies. They do have very sexy dancers for the music on the bars though. I will give them that, but only that. We went to Blu. I could not be certain that was where I was the night before, but the pole looked familiar. We danced there till close, Dom got accosted by some whale of a local who would not let him go. I grabbed some Mexican food, some random man followed us into our room to use the bathroom and we got some sleep knowing we had to rise early the next day.

We limped out of bed and headed for Santa Fe De Antioquia. We went on a very long walk in the blistering sun. It was shorter than Lonely Planet suggested though and they warned against walking in the midday sun. But I am an Englishman and I have a lot of affinity for mad dogs. First though we had the shittest lunch ever. One mangy bit of chicken. He must have been hard to kill given he was all bone and that's tough. Also some manky boiled potatoes posing as chips. We had to pay for this. Dom wanted to refuse, but I knew the guy would take his fee from my note. The bridge is impressive and spans over the river a few kilometres outside of town. Apparently I lie like a dog and Dom reckons thats why they all like me. Maybe. Had not thought about it that way. Still had nothing from Liliana and would not do so I can cut that one off. aybe when I am back in Medellin. I put Spurs drew with Everton so no Europe. Though as I write this we still have an outside chance. Might be better if we miss it. I will be almost 6000m up in the air tomorrow so finding the news will be difficult. We hitched a pick up truck back from the bridge which was cool. They were stoned, but their driving did not show it. I thought the town was pretty, but not as nice as Mompos. Dom cooked spaghetti for dinner in exhcnage for my soup and as he does not like picante stuff it came out good. There was a Swiss guy in our room. We got chatting with him and the Spanish girl. She declined to join us so we headed to a rock bar near Zona Rosa that always seemed to be full of people. Never did get my pub crawl. He was a really nice guy and may come and live in Bogota. If he does I have another flatmate. He did tell us of all the times he had pulled other girls on his travels before meeting his girlfriend in Peru. He told her. There relationship is nonexistant at the moment. Hmm not really surprised, but then I always frowned upon cheating. At least he was honest though. He did have an amusing story about a Dutch girl with whom he had just spent all night playing with her hands. She had a boyfriend as well and although nothing happened he considered it a special night and thought of it fondly. After Costa Rica and his story I believe this may be a Dutch speciality. This rock bar was really cool and played all sorts of rock and old English stuff. Clientele was cute and they do hunt gringos in this city, but seemingly every local girl has herself a much older gringo or local. Some of the age gaps are a little sick. If you hair turned grey before your girlfriend was born you need to look at yourself in a mirror. 'You spin me right round' came on the speakers and the others butchered it until I taught them to nail it. We ended up belting this song out in a mangled way and was so much fun that song will always remind me of Medellin. With no better options we again ended up in Blu. Three nights in a row was a little excessive. This was becoming like Pepes. It was a good place though. We got a Mexican afterwards and then this random guy came in. He was so drunk/drugged he could not speak and just gesticulated wildly. They tried to fulfil his order, but a medium space of air, with a side of a drunken grin was not on the menu. He then turned to us got on his knees, bowed and left. Interesting. I said to the guys behind the counter in Spanish 'He´s a little drunk, no?' The response was an incredulous smiling 'A little?' I love this country. We went to bed.

Again we had no sleep as we were up and off to El Penol. Trying to go abck to American style heavy partying and sightseeing was taking its toll. Then again Colombia along with the States and Puerto Rico are the only places I have been on this trip that I would live in. I decided the Kiwi guy who runs our hostel is a knob apparently. Harsh maybe. But he was. Penol is a weird place. Its in the middle of millions of artificial lakes. They have small villages. From the top of Penol it looks like Hobbitville. Google the pictures. It won't do the place justice. Penol itself is a 200m high granite rock that sticks out of the ground in the middle of all this. Its like either God or the engineer designed these lakes and was very impressed with their work. They decided what they needed was a huge rock that you can look down upon these lakes from and admire the handiwork of this stunning creation. You couldn't design a better scenario if you had all the creative talent in Hollywood. Then again maybe I should pick a place with some creatiove talent for that observation. Its sheer rock on all sides, some peasant once climbed it first and so naturally they built hideous concrete staircases all the way up the side. I say staircases, because there appears to be two proper ones intermingled with the remnants of about seven hundred historical ones. Nowhere else gives you options or how to go up and down and nowhere else can you get lost on a staircase. The views from the summit are sensational. Unfortunately there was a dickhead from Miami up there but he only spoilt it slightly. We descended and walked round Hobbitville to the town of Guatavite. This is like an English beachside tourist resort on a lake in Colombia. Imagine that. It would probably be quite good fun. We hung around here for a bit and got a bus back. Dom got chatting with a local girl and picked up her number. She had never heard of Barcelona. Thats a bad sign. She thought he was Ecuadorean. We are now in Ecuador. We have seen the men. This makes Dom upset. I don't blame him. Mind you most of the people here would not know Barcelona if it hit them between the eyes, but that is for later. We were going to have problems with the National Park. We ended up getting a very laet bus out of town to Manizales. Dom had spent 1 million pesos in 8 days. This did however include backdated pay for the 1,001 nights we spent in Bogota. Mark Twain's journal commentary was quite funny. He said everyone starts one, but only the strongest willed complete them. I'm hanging in there, though its tough. He also says a completed one is worth a fortune. Lets hope, eh. When we were on the bus Dom stated 'This light is killing me' and all the lights came on. Careful what you wish for or state. That seems a fitting end to the chapter.