Colombia!

Hola blogees!

Well its been a while since the last blog I know, but we have been busy little gringos. The astounding beauty of Colombia has distracted us and kept us away from the blog for a while. We have also been a bit rushed, having to cram many places into very little time. However, the time has come to catch up.

We´re currently in Medellin, which is famous for Pablo Escobar and his naughty henchmen. However, things have changed dramatically since the days of Pablo doing lines off strippers and simultaneously shooting people and blowing things up - Medellin is now a safe and shockingly well organised city. But we shall get to that in due time.

When we last wrote we were still in Quito, and the only other notable thing we did there was going to the Equatorial line - the middle of the earth. Ages ago, a french dude built a huge monument on the line of the Equator and made a pretty big deal out of it. The only thing is he missed by about 250m - zut allors! Anyway people still visit his monument and swallow all the lies they tell there, unaware that down the road is a museum and the site of the real equator. As it turns out, a native civilistation had built a monument on a hill top in the precise location of the equator, with angles of exactly 23.5 degrees (the tilt of the earth - i think). Smart little buggers. So we spent the day hopping between hemispheres and draining basins one meter on either side of the line to watch them drain in opposite directions. Also, it turns out you have far less strength and can´t balance very well while standing on the line. Pretty strange. After this we decided that it was time to leave Quito and head for the border. That proved slightly problematic. We got up at 4am and headed for the bus station to catch our 5:30 bus - only to wait until 8:30 before giving up and getting a ticket for the next day. The next day we got up at 4am to catch our 5:30 bus, only to discover it had left unexpectedly at 4am. Not wanting to give up, we got a taxi to drive us onto the highway and flag down a bus to the border.

A border crossing and a full day´s travelling later, we arrived in the small colonial town of Popayan, famous for its beautiful whitewashed buildings. However, we discovered that after a day or two one gets bored of just looking at whitewashed buildings, and although the town was strikingly pretty - we decided to head north to the city of Cali. Once in Cali we found the Tostaky Hostel in the pleasant neighborhood of San Antonio. We spent our days walking the streets lined with tropical trees, and sweating. Cali is very very hot. Its a bustling vibrant city and its leafy windy streets and large green parks make for excellent wandering around. We drank far too much coffee in Cali. In fact, since we crossed into Colombia we have been drinking far too much coffee - it is too good not too, despite the health risks.

While in Cali we began to eat a lot of fruit. Colombia has incredibly fertile soil - you notice this everywhere in the country - everything is green green green. We have seen every shade of green possible. Anyway all this greenness means that they can grow the best fruit imaginable. Aside from juicy watermelons the size of small cars, pineapples the size of... very larg pineapples and bannanas the size of Zeus´s... reputation in Greece; Colombia also has about 17 different fruits you cannot find anywhere else. They are all delicious. For instance, a Lulo has orange flesh that tastes like a mixture between a kiwi fruit and a naartjie; they also have passion fruits AND granadillas (two different fruits apparently) - the granadillas are the size of grapefruits. There is another kind of fruit that resembles a spikey papaya, but inside the flesh is snow white with tiny black seeds. Anyway I think I´m rambling on a bit about fruit.

Aside from the Cali Cartel, Cali is famous as the Salsa capital of the world. And I´m not talking about the stuff you put on your nachos, I´m talking about people shaking their asses. We decided that we needed to visit one of the famous Salsotecas. Anyone who has ever seen me try to Salsa will say, after shuddering, that I cannot. For this reason, I decided to recruit a Caleña salsa teacher to show us some steps. After large amounts of rum I managed to get the basic moves down, and Nadia finally had a worthy dance partner. We were now ready for Tin Tin Deo, one of Cali´s best salsa clubs. The club itself was pretty simple, the music and the dancing was pretty spectacular - everyone in the club was at least a semi professional salsa dancer, and it was quite intimidating for the Gringos to shake it. But the rum kept flowing and soon we were in the midst of the sweaty and sultry dancefloor.

Cali is an amazing city - one of the best we´ve seen on the trip - and we ended up staying longer than expected - if time was not an issue we would probably still be there. Through a friend of a friend, we had gotten in contact with someone who is from Cali, but lives in New York, and as it turned out, she was going to be in Cali for two days while we were there. After having lunch with Maria Eugenia at her apartment, she arranged for her personal assitant/driver/cool guy called Eriburto, to take us around the countryside surrounding Cali for a day. Eriburto was a smooth old cat who I constantly wanted to call Papa Georgio - although I managed to fight this urge. On our trip, Maria kindly arranged for us to have some muscle, in the form of two armed men who accompanied us throughout the day (although I am confident that if we had met the FARC along the way, they would have taken one look at my impressive biceps and run away). We spent the day driving around the spectacular countryside, visiting a lake, and the old sugarcane haciendas. From El Paraiso, a famous old hacienda we could appreciate just how beautiful Colombia is. Bright green sugarcane plantations dotted with old colonial houses stretch into the distance until they hit the green hills, which disappear into the clouds. Not bad at all.

Soon it was time to leave Cali. Our first impressions of Colombia were of an unimaginably beautiful place of rolling green hills and endless fields of fruit trees. Our first impressions of the Colombian people were of incredibly warm and open people who go out of their way to welcome you to their country - we have lost count of the amount of times a stranger has come up to us and begun chatting away like we were old friends, before ending with, `Bienvenidos a Colombia!`. Colombia has a reputation it does not deserve, and every Colombian you meet is grateful to have the chance to change your preconceptions about them. When you think of the country, the first things that come to mind are cocaine trafficking and endless bloodshed, of dodgy people who want to kidnap tourists. Apart from the guerilla groups who are hiding in the jungles to the East, the Colombian people are nothing like that, and Colombia itself is nothing short of a paradise.

It must be mentioned however, for the sake of an unbiased view, that Colombia´s problems are not completely a part of their history. This was most evident when, while watching tv in our hostel we were startled by an incredibly large rumbling sound, which turned out to be a car bomb exploding at the house of justice in the city center, about 5km from where we were, killing 5 and injuring 20. Sadly, these types of incidents, though very isolated, are still something that the Colombian people have to put up with.

From Cali we headed North into the Zona Cafeteria - the lush valleys of coffee plantations. We arrived in the town of Armenia (not in Europe, although there is also a town called Montenegro here), and then travelled to the nearby town of Salento, a tiny charming little town surrounded by misty mountains and valleys, in which you can see hundreds of fireflies at night. The highlight of our time in Salento was a day long walk through the Valle de Cocora, which I am convinced might just be the most beautiful place on earth. The valley is surrounded by (surprise - green) forested mountains that fade into the clouds, and hundreds and hundreds of wax palms shoot up above all the vegetation - some of the tops of the palms also hit the clouds. I won´t say much more about the place, except that its completely magical. Take a look at the pics.

Salento lies about 250km west of Bogota, the capital. 250km does not sound like much, but because of the high mountains you need to cross to get to Bogota (which sits rather high up at 2800m), the bus journey takes 10 hours. Let me rephrase that - the bus journey is meant to take 10 hours, but it took us 20. 20 hours to do 250km. Bugger. About 3 hours into the journey we stopped at a massive traffic jam, at 1am! As it turned out, the bridge crossing a deep valley, the only way of getting across the valley, was completely blocked off. After eventually falling asleep and hoping we would get moving soon, we woke up at 7am to find that we were in the same spot. What had happened was that the day before, two cranes were lifting something very large out of the valley, and it turned out to be too heavy for the cranes, which were pulled over the edge (crews and all) and plunged 200m to a very messy end. The locals of Godknowswherethehellwewhere told us the road might be open at 6pm that evening, or perhaps in a few days. A plan was needed. We spoke to an old man who had a jeep, and he agreed, for a fee, to take us across to the other side, from where we flagged down another jeep which managed to take us to the town of Ibague (it broke down twice and was repaired by the driver smacking it with a hammer in random places) from where we could get another bus to Bogota. On the way to Ibague, we got a chance to see the chaos that the bridge accident had caused, in the form of the longest truck traffic jam in history. The truck drivers had obviously given up on the traffic moving, and were taking naps under their trucks. A few of them had strung hammocks up on their trucks and were sleeping in those.Thus, after a hellishly long and complicated mission, we arrived in the big big city of Bogota in the early evening.

We had been in contact with someone from Bogota via a website called Couchsurfing. Couchsurfing is a phenomenon that is growing by the day - it is essentially a large community of people online offereing their couches for no cost to travellers - it has grown so much that you could travel the entire globe surfing people´s couches. Our first experience surfing a couch was a good one - Sebastian Gonzalez and his family took us into their house and treated us like family, even though we were two smelly South African backpackers that they didn´t know at all. This is the sort of thing that makes Colombians so welcoming - they are genuinely interested in other cultures and especially in people who travel to Colombia, which means there is always a welcome house to stay in. We were in Bogota to visit the Cuban Embassy and get our tourist visas, and also to explore Colombia´s giant capital city, with the help of Sebastian, a born and raised Bogotan. We soon realised we did not have nearly enough time to see Bogota - the sheer size of it, as well as its many many old churches, museums and amazing architecture prevents you from seeing the city entirely in a few days. What we did see of it gave us the impression of a busy and very important city with a good metro and bus system - the sorts of things Joburg really should have - although its huge and busy, the city runs pretty smoothly and its easy to get from one side to the other using the transport.

From Bogota we headed for Medellin, where we are now. Medellin is a city roughly the size of Cali (about 2.5 million), and is a very surprising place to visit. Infamous for Pablo Escobar and the Medellin Cartel, what you expect is a dusty and dodgy place - what you find is a very modern, clean and good looking city which boasts amazing backdrops of the surrounding hills (again, as green as a leprechauns hat) and a public transport system that should make Jeff Radebe feel like a complete tool. An efficent, safe and on time subway system (except that its above ground) spans the length and bredth of the city, and the system is integrated with cable cars that connect the suburbs in the hills to the center - getting out of a brand new metro train and onto a brand new cable car (powered by Solar panels!) and travelling 30m up over the city had us asking the question - why on earth can we not get it right? It also had us asking the question - where the hell does all the money come from? (Straight out of Pete Doherty´s pocket perhaps?)

To sum the blog up - Colombia has been an amazing surprise. We are regretting not having more time in this country, because it is a seriously cool place. We will be back here one day, hopefully quite soon. In a way, the horror stories of Colombia have meant that the hoards of tourists stay away, and while this is not a good thing for the Colombian tourist industry, it does mean that the few gringos who do venture into the country, end up with an Eden all to themselves. We are trying not to eat the apple, or get bitten by the snake (or sleep with the snake, I´m not quite sure how the Adam and Eve story really works).

From Medellin, we head up north to Santa Marta on the coast. Which means in a few days we will hit the top of a continent we have been trying to get to know for the past 6 months. Celebrating this will not be hard, because if you get your maps out, you will notice that Colombia´s large north coast in slap bang in the Carribean. I think Colombia is about to get even better, if that´s even possible.

We shall see.

Adios!

Here are the many many pics from Colombia so far - go look at them to see what I´m on about

http://picasaweb.google.com/steveo.zogg/popayan

http://picasaweb.google.com/steveo.zogg/cali

http://picasaweb.google.com/steveo.zogg/salento

http://picasaweb.google.com/steveo.zogg/bogota