Medellin Gets A New Pablo

Our overnight bus from Cartagena to Medellin took us through one of most intense storms we've ever seen. Pouring rain, blustering winds, and lightning like strobe lights periodically woke us up from our uncomfortable napping through the night. Just past daybreak, we pulled into the North terminal station of Medellin, figured out the light rail system (the only one in all of Colombia), and made it to our first hostel, the Black Sheep.

Medellin is a strangely beautiful city. Spreading down an immense valley, hundreds of barrios (neighborhoods) stretch up the hillsides, with their homogeneous brick houses and shops coating the view in red and gray. After taking care of some errands, we headed out on the metro to the center of the city. The hectic streets were packed with vendors in front of a mix of historical buildings and ugly newer businesses. We wandered down a side street along a beautiful produce market and ducked into a no-frills looking restaurant, where we got our cheapest meal of the trip so far, a complete almuerzo (two course lunch with a drink) for 3,000 pesos, less than a dollar fifty.



After exploring the rest of the city center, with the usual grandiose cathedrals and plazas, we took the metro down to the cable car line, which is a suspended line of six person cars that ride on a line high above the buildings, up into the barrios on the mountainside. Looking down on the bustling late afternoon scene, we had to remind ourselves that 10 or 15 years ago, this was one of the most dangerous places in the world, with drug cartel-driven crime so vicious that even the police wouldn't come here.





Now, children run around playing soccer in the streets, well-dressed families hang out on doorsteps and benches, and laundry hangs swaying on lines running across the rooftop patios on every building. It was getting a little late so we headed back towards the hostel, stopping along the way to walk around a beautiful complex of parks and museums.

We were lucky enough to get a video of a very unlucky bird while we were hanging out in the Santo Domingo cable car station up in the hills... here it is! (Apologies for the first half of the video being shot sideways... I´m an airhead.)



That night we checked out the upscale Zona Rosa area near our hostel. It was mostly empty on a Monday night, just a few younger Colombians hanging out in the plazas drinking shots of Aguadiente, the funky local anise-flavored liquor.

The next day we put together a plan to visit one of the restaurants that Anthony Bourdain went to in his Colombia episode, followed by visits to the grave of the most famous and ruthless drug lord of all time, Pablo Escobar. I found the address of the restaurant on a great blog about Medellin, got the ballpark location figured out, and from there plotted detailed directions to the grave, writing down everything. The hostel owner told us the restaurant was a half hour walk, so we headed out, walking for about 25 minutes before I realized I had forgotten the paper with all of the directions. I remembered enough from writing it down to get us to the right street. It ended up being a two hour walk, and after we spent another 30 minutes searching, we gave in and went into an internet cafe to get the exact address.

Finally we found the place, Brasarapa, an unassuming restaurant with picnic tables on a gravel patio on a corner. We went in and happened to sit at the same table as Anthony Bourdain did, and then ordered the same thing as him, purely by coincidence. This attracted the attention of the owner, Victor, who came over with our food, realizing we were there because of the show, and proceeded to bring out his personal photo album from the day of filming. To add to the mounting evidence that Colombians are the friendliest people in the world, after showing us the photos, he pulled one out and gave it to us – super cool! Then we ate our ridiculously large lunch, the Bandeja Especial. It consisted of a creamy soup with tough bits of some pork product, followed by a platter with salad, rice, a fried egg, a big steak, two pieces of pork, a chorizo sausage, half an avacado, and beans, topped by the best fresh aji salsa of our entire trip.





It was all killer, no filler – well worth the two and a half hour effort to find the place. We paid our bill, got a picture with Victor, and took off for Escobar's grave

We walked away (slowly now) towards the grave, winding again through the streets without definite directions, jumping on the metro to go down a couple stops, and then tracing our way with another stop at an internet cafe, down an industrial road to the cemetery in the foothills. Once we were there, our uncanny “spidy sense” led us right to the grave, a small black headstone in a grassy family plot alongside a church. We got some pictures and met some other Escobar enthusiasts. It was too late to go across town to the death site so we just split a cab back to our hostels.

That night we laid low, catching the Magic – Cavs playoff game and getting ready for our side trip to the jungle refuge of Rio Claro the next morning (see the next blog post).

Two days later we were back in Medellin for the weekend. We switched to a different hostel, a nightmare called The Pitstop. I'm not sure which is worse, the place or the clientèle. About 95% of the hostel was composed of European, Australian, and Israeli guys whose sole purpose in being there was to do drugs and go crazy. This problem was exasperated by the army bunker layout of the hostel with several dozen beds in each room. We spent very little time there, going out on our own for the night to some bars in Zona Rosa and then leaving early the next morning for yet another hostel, Kasa Kiwi.

Thankfully, the third try was the charm, a laid-back, fairly small place with a sweet location and cheap prices. We stayed through the weekend, going out again on Saturday, then taking a group of new friends to Brasarapa for lunch on Sunday and out to Escobar's grave. We should be running our own tour group at this point. After that we went back up to the barrios via the cable cars, and hung out there until around 11pm, sitting outside of a sidewalk cafe, looking at the view of the city fading from a maze of brick to an endless set of sparkling lights extending out across the valley.

The next morning we got packed and went to the Southern terminal, where we payed $15 for an uncomfortable four hour ride wedged in the rock hard backseat of a tiny car to get to Manizales.