Bogota and Medellin — The road liss traveled

Time to get back into city living! From Gaudalupe it was 1 hour by 4x4 to get back to the highway and then another 5 or 6 hours into Bogota. Seriously, it takes a long time to get from A to B in Colombia when you’re up in the mountains. Every single road is 2 lanes and there’s million slow moving trucks backing up the traffic constantly. Of course it could be worse for me, I’d heard some traveler horror stories of semi-trucks flipping on the highway or landslides and creating delays for absurd amounts of time, like 10-15 hours. So fortunately I have not had that experience yet!

I got into Bogota around 9pm and grabbed a taxi to my hostel in La Candeleria, which is the historic downtown section of Bogota. I’ve heard this area can be a bit sketchy at night, so I figured I’d test that out for myself, with very few valuables of course. And like most places it seemed fine, if you stay on the main, well-lit streets there’s enough people around where it’s hard to imagine getting into any trouble. Quite a few bums and vagrants around though. Although some of the small side streets with no one around definitely had me on edge a little bit. But nothing to report there. I called it an early night.

The next day was touristy stuff day. I had a walk around Bolivar Square, which is arguably the most famous part of the city. If there are any big demonstrations in the city, this is where they’ll be. It’s filled with pigeons, street vendors, and tourists! The focal point is the church (like every square in Colombia) built a few hundred years ago. From there I walked up towards the hills, which is a little rough around the edges, but you can tell the city had been working to improve the area, with lots of fresh paint and street art, as well as a veritable police presence! It had some nice, cheap coffee shops and budget hostels.

The view back down from the hills in La Candelaria

Eventually I made it to the Museo Del Oro, the Gold Museum, which has a great collection of artifacts from every period in Colombia’s history. A pretty cool place. And I’m a big fan of museums that have high quality audio guides, which this one had! After that I was all geared up to hike Montserrat hill ( I really need to lose this stomach pudge) which is the big hill/mountain with sweeping views over the whole city. I feel like the word hill is too understated, but the word mountain is too much, there needs to be a better word to describe these hills! Although when I got there at 2pm they said the hiking trail was closed (it closed at 1pm) because later in the afternoon they were concerned about robberies on the hike up. Weak! Although you could still take the cable car up, which I did, but was not happy about it. I mean the view at the top was pretty cool though. The city is so huge and expansive, especially compared to the one little neighborhood that I’d walked through.

Next up, poker time. I went back to the hostel, grabbed my cash and took a taxi to the Parque 93 area, the most hip, modern part of the city, which also has the best poker action. And when I walked in I was impressed to see a bunch of tables running, although for NL hold’em action the highest game was 2,500/5,000 pesos, which is the USD equivalent of a .75/$1.50 game. So pretty small, but the action was good, tons of terrible players, I ran my $200 buy-in up to over $1,000 at one point, but then lost some back at the end, due to some overly reckless, possibly alcohol induced play.

It’s hard not to bluff a lot in these games when the value of $100 or $200 is so much more to most of the Colombians playing than myself. They did catch onto that eventually. But I had a great time screwing around at these stakes and won enough to pay for about 1/3rd of the trip in one night. Although I paid for it 20 minutes later when my iphone must have slipped out of my pocket in the cab getting home, sigh. Now I’m operating a $100 Huawei smartphone, which on the plus side I don’t care what happens to it! I really don’t like traveling with anything that’s overly important to me. Even my camera equipment is so old now that I wouldn’t be exactly be crushed if something happened to it. Laptop also. But losing that iphone definitely stung a little bit.

Cable car heading up the hills in Medellin. Not my photo though, credit Lonely Planet.

The next day was a bus to Medellin. I really didn’t get a chance to explore too much of Bogota, but basically every single traveler I’d met had said they liked Medellin better, so that’s enough anecdotal evidence for me. Plus Bogota weather is crap, it’s up in the mountains and the usual forecast is cloudy, rainy and a bit chilly. Medellin isn’t that far away as the crow flies, but winding through the mountains it’s a solid 9 or 10 hour trip. I got in pretty late, and was happy to hit the hay at 11pm or so when I got checked into my hostel. The dudes sharing my room popped in at one point to do some blow before heading out the bars, and were nice enough to offer me some, but I had to decline. The legacy of the cocaine cartels is apparently alive and well!

Having spent a good amount of time on the road and staying in hostels I was about ready for some R&R time, so I had a pretty nice airbnb booked for the next few days. It’s pretty great when you can book a very nice studio in the heart of the most expensive part of town for <$50/night. So honestly, I did very little in Medellin. At the same time there’s not like a ton of touristy stuff to do around town. But I had some photos to catch up on, work on my blog, research to do for the rest of the trip, buying a new phone, getting my laptop fixed etc.

I did make it to Botero square in the El Centro, which hosts a very cool looking museum dedicated to the artwork of Fernando Botero, as well as many interesting characters in the square itself. I met some middle aged Americans who stayed around there (for a very specific reason that definitely wasn’t the works of Botero) who warned me it was probably a good idea to get out before nightfall. The one guy was telling me a story about getting jumped by some teens a week ago and fighting them off with his very sturdy umbrella. It made me chuckle thinking of the movie the Kingsman. But El Centro is definitely a bit shady.

I also made it to the huge market, which has a fruit section where you can find basically every fruit they grow in Colombia. There are still so many ones I’ve never seen before and don’t know the name of! I picked up a few to sample at home. Lulo, tomate de arbole, granadilla were some of the names I remembered. Some were pretty good, but some were seriously tart and not the best to be eaten by themselves!

A very small sampling of the fruits available

the downstairs meat section was also incredibly largeda

And I’m not sure what these were, some sort of hanging plants? aromatics? This guy had to walk up a two different ladders to reach these!

The location of my airbnb was pretty cool, it’s the most upscale part of town and has the majority of the nightlife. Just next to my airbnb was a really nice Italian restaurant, a beautifully designed vegan restaurant, an artisanal bakery and sandwich shop, a great ice cream shop, and one the fanciest restaurants in town – something like the Alinea of Medellin. I really thought about going there by myself (would have cost $80 for 13 courses instead of the $300+ at Alinea) but couldn’t pull the trigger! But I think that gives you a good idea of the neighborhood, it’s probably not what you’d expect from Colombia.

And just blocks away is Parque de Illerias, which is where all of the nightlife is based around. The first night I was in the airbnb was Saturday, so I went back to the hostel bar to meet some people and had a fun night barhopping some of the clubs. It’s a very lively area, and definitely more dancing going on than in American nightclubs. Colombians are born and raised dancing, so it’s weird for them to not like dancing. And I must say, Medellin has some extremely attractive women! And it’s not like they’re overly dressed up or made up, they’re just very good looking. It’s unfortunate the quality of my Spanish…

After a few days of laying low I decided I should kick back into travel mode and go for a daytrip to a nearby town called Guatape. It’s two hours away and features a landscape full of fingerling lakes, a rock huge that you can walk to the top of, and a colorful little touristy town. It was definitely a worthwhile trip! In fact most of the photos I took in/around Medellin were from Guatape, so here they are!