Partying in Medellin

Medellin, Colombia
after Salento, before Cartegena... whatever dates that´d be.

   I don´t go partying a lot while travelling, but on Thursday night at Babylon nightclub in Medellin I had the most fantastic time! I danced and danced! The bar was open (free drinks) but I didn´t have time. If only I could have caught up with that other tourist the next day.... but he disappeared on me :(
   Medellin is also known for its sculptures, by an artist whose name I keep forgetting.

Terrorists bombed one of the sculptures. The artist rebuilt it, but insisted that the original remain as a reminder to what war achieves (in this case the loss of 33 lives of people in the plaza).

Myself and 5 hostel mates rode the cable car to the top of the city to see the view ...... nice huh?

We went to Guatape, and before climbing up the rock, I ate..... that´s nice fatty pork skin at the side. Yummo!

You see the stairs in the side of the rock I got to climb?! No wonder I ate food to feed a lumberjack first.

Clare and I at the top. Yeah!
It was worth it!

Really worth it!

Oh, and going up I liked the bromeliads growing on the rock and the sight they created.

Notes
Accom in Medellin: Black Sheep hostel $10. good people stay there.

Troublesome tourist (me, that is)

Cartegena, Colombia
24-now May 2010

   Some tourists are such a bother! Well that´s the distinct impression I got from yesterdays guide...

   My travel mate Jon and I were going on a tour to the 'mud volcano'. We were the first to be picked up and I chose seats at the front of the bus (best view, more comfy ride). More tourists got on and the guide gave them instruction to sit down the back of the bus, so they did. Then the guide got on and told Jon and I (in bad English) we were to sit in 'behind' of the bus, because that´s where the English speaking tourists must sit. I replied, in Spanish (possibly bad too), that I was happier to sit in the front and hear the Spanish. She got angry. Even the driver chipped in to my defense that I could speak Spanish. But no, the guide wasn´t happy.
   Most the seats were full by then, Jon decided we´d move back. But there was now room to only move 2 seats back! Then the guide came and told me that I should be sitting further back, and it wouldn´t be her fault if I didn´t understand what anything was. She repeated this statement several times, just to be sure I got her point.
   The tour was hardly guided at all, just led, and I heard and understood both languages and managed everything quite ok.
   Other tourists have the reverse problem of course. Imagine the guy from Sweden who was born in Colombia but adopted by his Swedish parents as a baby! He was in Colombia to learn the lingo and find out abit about his heritage. Sometimes some Asian tourists pass as latinos too, and people thus insist on speaking Spanish to them.
   After the first language barrier, the bus stopped to put air in the tyre and it blew. Another bus came for us, but  I'm pretty sure the guide tried to leave me behind, since I passed by her and she diverted her eyes just seconds prior to another tourist telling me the replacement bus had arrived.

   The day was great though! The mud volcano 'El Totumo' is a 15m mound which spews mud instead of lava. You take stairs up to the top and climb into the mud. The mud is a lovely temperature and consistency and is said to contain minerals, and today (one day after) my skin feels spectacular. Once in handsome toned black guys give you a massage... well the male tourists seem to get a quick rub, female tourists, noticably single ones (like me) seem to get extended rubs... to the point where you have to tell them 'whoa'.
   Then is down to the lake to be roughly handed by a old woman who strips you in no time, cleans you and your togs (bikini or other), and sends you on your way.
   Oh, and while you are at the top, you have given your camera to a guy who miraculously remembers which camera (of the 10-15 others he has) is yours and takes your photo with it whenever you look his way (which I forgot to look so often).

The day went to a great start.

Getting in, carefully.... don´t wanna slip and fall into the mud!

The muddy you and message you and push you onto the next person.... actually moving of your own free will is difficult.

Me and my #1 masseuse.... I stuck my arm around his shoulder for the photo, after I removed it he looked at his shoulder like 'oh, gross, now I´ve got mud on me!'

Getting out, another guy wipes the excess mud away. I had to empty my bikini myself.

The lunch stop was at the pleasant carribean beach.

Notes
Tour $20, required tipping $1.50 to $2.50 each for massage, washing, photographer.

Coffee Beans in Salento, Colombia

Salento, Colombia
17-19 May 2010

   Colombia is known for its cocaine and for its coffee. I don´t plan to visit the coca fields around these parts, but I did visit the lovely coffee growing region and spent a couple of nights there. Salento´s a lovely town, Plantation houses' coffee plantation tour was fantastic (and I thought that after being in Guatemala and seeing coffee production there that I might be bored), and the Valle de Cocora Hike was splendid.

Coffee beans drying.... with sliding roof to cover over if it rains.

The view from the coffee plantation, and the building on it is made from native home grown bamboo... beautiful!

Colombia doesn´t have a lot of seasonality... so this stem shows the coffee plant with several stages of coffee bean growth. Flowers, small beans, and large beans.

Wax palms

Bridge crossings were tricky on the hike.

The suspension bridge we had to cross was a bit rough.

Saw this sign about a dozen times in Spanish and in English. You have to pay... if you keep going. It is about $1.50 and you´ll get a free drink, with cheese.

Why you had to pay to keep going was to sit and enjoy the hummingbirds. I might never tire of them and I saw about 6 different ones here.

There was a road on the other side of the mountin top farm, but they were bringing stuff down on the backs of small horses down the rough track.

More Wax Palms and tourist, so you can appreciate how tall they are.

Notes
Plantation House Accomodation $9
Plantation House Coffee Plantation tour $2.50
Jeep to Valle de Cocora Hike $1.50 each way, entry to Hummingbird spot $1.50, incl free drink and cheese.

Staying with family of friends near Cali

Ginebra,near Cali, Colombia
15 -17 May 2010

   In Australia I am fortunate enough to have a few Colombian friends, and some of them have invited me to stay with their families. So in Cali I met with the brother of my friend Maria and he and his friend took me to see some sights of Cali and then out to stay in his mother’s house with Maria’s Mum and he, in Ginebra.
   It was a wonderful opportunity for me, although I didn’t ever have much of an idea of what anyone was staying (maybe it was an extreme country accent) or what was happening.
   I stayed 2 nights. On the Sunday when Mauricio (Maria’s brother) finally got out of bed at 2pm, we visited 2 local haciendas which I really enjoyed. The first was particularly beautiful and haciendas, being the big old country houses of years past, can be difficult to get to as a tourist. The first hacienda, Hacienda Paraiso, once had 12000 hectares of land!

One of Cali´s attratcions is a park dedicated to an artists decorated fiberglass cats. You can see some of the cats in the background.

I couldn´t get a goodshot of this,but I didn´t want to forget it either. A steep concrete driveway, and kids toboganing down it on milkcrates packed with stuff to sit into it. 

The beautiful Hacienda Paraiso

Nice....good country here.

Notes
Bus Popayan to Cali $5
Accomodation, Solento: Plantation House $8. Great hostel, friendly, good meeting place.
Bus Ginebra to Buga $1.50; Buga to Armenia $6.50; Armenia to Solento $1.60

Homesick

Popayan
13 - 15 May 2010
   I have a tendency never to feel homesick and I never miss home. I always say that I think it’s easy for me to not feel home sick because the world I am off discovering is interesting, new and exciting. I think that the people left at home might be more inclined to miss the traveller because their world is much the same, but minus the person that left. However, on Friday night I think I had my first feeling of homesickness in this entire trip.
   I had gone to Popayan. I had heard from another traveller that the Salsa dancing was good in Popayan, and being that I would be hosted by the family of a friend when I went to Cali (the Salsa Capital), on whom I didn’t want to impose my need to dance, I decided to stop in Popayan and ‘get my fix’. The night was ‘painful’.
   First, for those who don’t know, I dance quite well. Well enough that when I dance in Brisbane Square with certain friends of mine the crowd has been known to stop, watch, gasp, and applause. But the locals here don’t know this. They just see a “gringa” and have no idea if I can dance. Good dancers are often bits of snobs when it comes to dancing (I have been known to be), we like to dance with people who can dance and don’t like to waste time on beginners (I do try not to be like this). So I wasn’t getting any dance invites, and the good dancers weren’t wasting any time off the dance floor to be snapped up.
   Then an old man (I’d say 70) invited me to dance with him. I accepted. It was boring... a typical Colombian Salsa shuffle*. He was also my next invite, I accepted again out of desperation. Again, he was invite number 3.... I said no, I need to dance with others, so he sent his friend up to dance with him. Then there was another old man, drunk. Arrgh! I was about to give up.
   Then an Australian guy, studying Spanish via a NZ university came in and although he didn’t dance, I had someone to talk to. But, old man #1 came back again to invite me to dance, I didn’t want to so I said “No Thank you”. But he got insistent, keeping saying “but I want to dance with you” and me replying “but I don’t want to dance with you and I am talking to someone now”. Then, and he was quite drunk by now, he came around and tried to barge his was between me and the Aussie! His friend had to come and pull him away and make him sit down. I was being fought for by an old man! What a terribly horrid night it was!
   I just wanted the company of my dancing friends back home. People who know I can dance and never leave me at the side of the dance floor unless I am insisting on a break.

*Colombians pretty much all seem to salsa dance, but for most of them the dance isn’t anything too flash, it’s social, and consists of the basic footwork and maybe the odd turn. I like to have more spins and tricks.

Notes: Accommodation, Popayan: Hostel Trail (part of a network). $8. Great hostel, great location, full of great travellers.

Quoting Others

This is something I overheard today amongst chatting travellers.
   Australian: Why do Americans always say horseback riding?
   American: Why? What do you mean?
   Australian: Well, we say horseriding.
   2 Americans, in unison: Oh, that sounds sexual.
               !!??!!??

Entering Colombia

Ipiales and Pasto, Colombia
8 - 11 May, 2010

   Oh I wish I hadn’t stopped overnight in Ipiales. It was one of those dodgy border towns. For the first time in my life I saw a real life police man chasing a real life man down the street.... previously in my life this was only something that happened in movies and cop shows. Then there were the prostitutes so obviously standing outside the cheap hotel (not my cheap hotel), the warnings about not walking anywhere, even in broad daylight, in case of being robbed, and then my hotel having an all night party upstairs to which I never got an invite but was forced to try and sleep through.
   I expect that what I should have done was have gone the extra 7kms to Santuario de Las Lajas and stayed there overnight. It should have been a far nicer experience.
   I did go out to Las Lajas in the morning. It’s a Neo-Gothic church built directly into the rock wall of a spectacular gorge, at a sight where they believe the image of the Virgin Mary appeared in the rock face. The rock walls of the canyon surrounding the sanctuary are lined with plaques giving thanks to the Virgin Mary for prayers answers and help received.
   At Las Lajas I had a fruit salad, imagine my surprise when they topped it with Condensed milk and grated cheese!
   The next stop was Pasto, the town didn’t have a lot to keep a person there, but 45 minutes away is Colombia’s biggest lake (Laguna de la Cocha). I took a ride out to it and was fortunate to have the company of a Swiss guy and German girl going at the same time as me. The 45 minute ride out there took about 2 hours. We had to wait for extra passengers and then the car broke down.
   The lake itself is not spectacular, but very cute. The approach to it is surrounded by Swiss styled chalets (the swiss guy confirmed this) of wood panelling, and red geraniums, selling lunches of trout from the lake. On the lake a boat trip was taken to the island in the middle, where there was a 500m hike across the island. The 45 minute trip back took 45 minutes.

 Fresh Goats milk, couldn´t be fresher, being sold by the glass in the plaza of Ipiales.

 Llamas, or maybe they are Alpacas... I´m confused, but so are they, they think they are Mexican.

 Las Santuario de Las Lajas.

 Laguna de Cocha

 The Swiss Chalet restaurants beside the lake.

 The chalets are really only pretty from the front.

Notes: 
Accommodation, Ipiales: Hotel Belmonte $8. This hotel has its listing in Lonely Planet and Footprints guides now, so I expect it has risen it’s prices and stopped trying, since business will come anyway. 
Pasto: Koala Inn $8, very friendly place. 
Transport: Collectivo to Lake $2 each way. Trout Lunch $3.

Otavalo, Ecuador.
5 April - Saturday 8 April, 2010

   Otavalo is famous for it's Saturday market. The big bit is for the tourists, but there's local stuff too, including an animal market, and that's why I stayed in town waiting for Saturday to arrive. I wasn't disappointed.
    I also went on a days horse riding on a horse that was easy to control, but gee was it rough to ride. My body ached for days!
   Otavalo is where I also bought jeans, as I previously wrote about.

Obviously the locals shop in Otavalo too!

Everyday the stock is carried out to the streets and to be displayed for sale. And it's all carried in on their backs.

An old hacienda house, abandoned, where we went horse riding.

Cattle sale. Each owner stands with his cow or bull and talks to potential buyers about their offers.

Chicken Sale. Aside from cattle and chickens there were also ducks, rabbits, guinea pigs. All might be eaten.

$US400 was being asked for her.

These little pigs (about a foot tall) were asking $US45 each.

Rope anyone?

All the best parts of the beast in this soup. Just the way to finish up at the sale! (I went into town and had blackberry pie instead.)

Accomodation in Otovalo: Riviera Sucre Hotel, beautiful building. Private room, private bath $15, shared bath $9.

Most dangerous drive of my life.

Bus Journey Pasto - Mocoa - Pitalita - San Augustin , Colombia
Tuesday 11 April, 2010

San Augustin
11 April - 13 April, 2010.

I´m a bit behind on my blog writing. I haven´t yet written about my final days in Ecuador, or my first days in Colombia. But I want to tell you about the bus journey I took on Tuesday.
   Firstly, it was a big day. 3 separate trips and about 12 hours in total. Going the way I went isn´t the most common way of getting to San Augustin, but I didn´t really want to come up to Popayan and then go to San Augustin and have to come back again to Popayan on the same road.
   The first part of the journey took 7 hours. It was mostly a narrow road that followed around the side of steep, deep ravines. If we approached a car or truck from the other direction one of us had to back up. The road was also wet, and all of it was dirt.
   A old cow farmer sat beside me for most of the journey. In the first part of the journey he kept questioning me about my family... my mum, my dad, my brother. "Isn´t your mum worried about you?" "Well, no", I answered, "I don´t think so". Then I realised he possibly thought I was way younger than I am, since his questioning was really suited to a much younger person. So I told him that I am 35 (actually I'm not yet, but it just slipped out). "Oh", he said, he thought I was 25.
   Well then, the conversation continued. "Aren´t you worried?" "Well, no", I answered, "why worry?, que sera, sera" (whatever will be, will be). And then at every turn he started detailing how many vehicles had gone over the edge, and how many were killed and where there had been landslides! Ironically, I still didn't worry. Que sera, sera.
   Really, I can´t see the point in worrying about it. I'm not driving the bus, so there isn´t a thing I can do.
   There were other dangers in this journey (I didn´t realise it before I went this way). In the first part of the journey police removed everyone from the bus in two locations. They took all our ID´s away and registered them in a computer, and all the men were "padded down" to make sure they weren´t concealing anything. (Apparently the women don´t get checked unless there is a woman officer available to do it). This is because we were, apparently, bordering on some warring (guerilla) territory. Twice I saw camoflagued men wielding big machine guns in pathways in the countryside, kind of like the depictions of men guarding drug crops in the movies. The Lonely Planet South America (2006?) says that Colombia controls 80% of the worlds cocaine market. It was an interesting day.

San Augustin was a lovely place. I only stayed 2 nights, I think it was enough. Lots of people stay longer, but that might be more to do with local drug availability.

San Augustin is famous for it's 'statues', which I took a horse riding trip to see (almost everyone does I think), but I really liked the Colombian landscapes better than the statues.

The horse riding group.

One of the many statues we got to see. They were used to guard tombs, this one still does.

Waiting at the cross roads for a bus to take me to my next stop (Popayan), I appreciated the local method of milk delivery. The white drum on the fuel tank is full of milk. The shirtless man is buying the milk. More milk, or maybe cream, was taken from a drum on the back of the bike.

Notes:
Buses: Bus ticket prices in Colombia are negotiable. This is a first for me.
Pasto to Mocoa: asked $11, paid $10. Mocoa to Pitalita: asked $7.50, paid $5. to San Augustin: asked $2.50, paid $2.
Accomodation in San Augustin: Casa de Japones, asked $6, paid $5. Great breakfast $2.50. it was ok, but not to my style.

Stepping over the equator in Quito, Ecuador.

Quito, Ecuador
30 April - 5 May 2010


   Equador equals equator in Spanish. The country straddles the equator. Quito is the capital, and it´s a lovely city.

In the San Fransisco Church in Old Quito, a beautiful church.

I climbed to the top of the Basilica, well worth doing for the view. But must they graffiti everything in these countries?

Cute Ice Cream Van inn the streets of Quito.

Yep, standing on the equator. I also balanced an egg on the head of a nail and was given a certificate to prove it.

Just  up from the place where one stands on the equator there is a inhabited volcano crater, which I went to see. Apparently it´s not too common to live in a Volcano Crater. And no, it´s not an extinct volcano.

Notes:

Accom in Quito:

Secret Garden $10 in dorm, woken up each of the 2 nights by room mates coming home at 3am. So I moved.

San Blas Hostel $6 private room (Shared bath). Much better deal!

Public transport 25c to almost everywhere.