Popayan is known as the city of white because of its large colonial old town where stark white, mostly ambiguous old buildings line the streets. As a result, walking through Popayan is beautiful but disorienting, and even after several days there we struggled to find places we had already been multiple times. We checked into the HostelTrail, the city's only hostel and the headquarters for our favorite online hostel directory, hosteltrail.com. We quickly became friends with the owners, Tony and Kim, a couple from Scotland. Tony told me that he had been considering switching his site over to a database-driven system and I offered some suggestions, leading to us arrange a free stay in exchange for my help in designing a customized content management system for the site, a really cool project to get to take part in.
Besides working with Tony on the site, we explored the old city a lot and went out at night, making friends with the locals, our favorite pastime. We also had some business to attend to in Popayan, to get our Colombian visas extended beyond the originally-issued 60 days. This can only be accomplished in certain cities that have immigration offices, and it was a somewhat painful process that took three days to finish. The first day we went into the office, a sleepy but friendly guy got our paperwork started and gave us a checklist of things to do in order to get the extension (in Spanish, of course). First, we had to go make a deposit for around $35 into a government account at a particular bank in the old city. Then, we had to go to a photo shop and get some passport-size photos taken. We got all of that done the same afternoon and went back into the office the next day, planning to get it finished up and be on our way. That day though, we went in, turned in our homework, filled out some more forms, and got two complete sets of finger and hand prints taken, only to be told that we could come in the following afternoon to finally get our extension stamps. Thankfully we did on our third visit. A lot of red tape, but worth it for a couple extra weeks to finish our exploration of southern Colombia.
The following Monday we took a three day trip out to the archaeological sites at San Agustin and Tierradentro before coming back to Popayan to wrap up the project with Tony, sell my broken laptop ($50, what a deal), and hang out on the town for one last weekend before leaving Colombia for Ecuador.
* Note: Russ broke his camera in Salento, so we didn´t get any of our own pics of Popayan!
The coffee region became more and more stunning with every mile as we rode in the back of a small bus for the five hour trip to Salento. When we arrived, it was obvious that Salento must lie in the pinnacle of the beauty. Forested mountains dominated the horizon as far as we could see, their peaks obscured by misty clouds that raced by and oozed down the hillsides. Coffee plantations and old farmhouses filled the valleys extending from every angle around the town. Walking through the streets felt like going back in time. Old cowboys with mustaches and ponchos rode by in groups on horses and packed around tables in billiard halls.
Customers stood in line in a butcher shop with huge sides of beef and whole pig carcasses hanging from meat hooks behind the counter, with cow's heads stacked on the floor. Kids and old people sat on benches in front of shops and restaurants with white walls, multicolored doorways, and thick wooden shutters.
We found our hotel, La Casona de Lili, and went in through an old wooden hallway and staircase that smelled and squeaked like it had been waxed daily for 150 years. Lili greeted us with hugs and boisterous Spanish conversation, most of which we couldn't follow. We each got our own room with queen beds, an antique lamp, and simple shelves, for $8 each. Lili likes to cook, so we ordered some dinner. Russ got the Salento specialty, river trout - literally every restaurant in town sells it - and I got a chicken rice dish. That night we went hung out in the plaza and met a bunch of locals, who we ended up hanging out with every night for the next several days we stayed.
Besides hanging out around town, Salento had some great hiking. We walked down through town, across a bridge, and down a dirt road which descended into one of the valleys towards a big coffee plantation.
Little kids followed us along, saying “hello” over and over again to practice the only English word they knew. Farmers walked by guiding lines of cattle strung together with ropes towards their gruesome fate at the butcher shop. We took pictures of the views that appeared around every corner and picked coffee berries off the bushes, cracking them open to see the white, slick raw beans inside. Old Willy jeeps bumped down the road carrying groups of school children in full uniforms who waved and laughed as they went by. We turned around at the bottom of the road and headed back up the long hill as a guy in a beat up old red Datsun struggled by us with his car loaded in every nook and cranny and piled on the roof with bunches of bananas. Colombia is bananas.
The Valle de Cocora, home of Colombia's national tree, the wax palm, sits up in the mountains about 30 minutes from Salento. We took a jeep up to the last small town. From there, we trekked up a dirt road that eventually became a trail. All around us, growing from the grassy hillsides, were soaring wax palms, these skinny palm trees 200 feet tall with a cluster of leaves at the very top. The whole area looked like something out of a Dr. Seuss book.
The trail crossed back and forth across a river, then up further into the mountains. Occasionally we would cross muddy streams, rustling up dozens of small, brightly-colored butterflies that would fly all around us before landing back in the mud. As has been the case throughout Colombia, we had this place all to ourselves, and didn't run into any other hikers for almost the entire time.
On Sunday the town went crazy. Salento is a popular weekend getaway for people from the surrounding areas as far away as Bogota. Big tents popped up in the plaza, all serving trout. Guys with carts decorated as miniature party buses or with fake horses gave little kids rides around the central park and fountain. Every other person had an ice cream cone. I bought a poncho and borrowed a hat from the Lili, and we played pool in one of the billiards halls with a couple friends from the hotel alongside all of the old cowboys. People passing by outside couldn't believe their eyes when they saw our gang of gringos in there, and crowded around the doors and windows with cameras and camcorders to document the oddity. It was a Sunday Funday.
We relaxed around town the following day, hiked up a hillside overlooking town, caught up on some emails and phone calls, and left on Tuesday for Popayan.
Manizales sits at the northern end of the coffee region, amidst green rolling hills and cloud forests. The city is built into the hills so its streets are a winding mess and due to a couple of catastrophic earthquakes, most of the buildings are new and fairly bland. Nonetheless, it is an obviously prosperous city. Our hostel, The Mountain House, was located in a nice neighborhood full of contemporary houses that looked like they were designed by Mike Brady. Just up the hill, a big high-end mall anchored the main street packed with upscale shops and restaurants, along with some bizarre contemporary art statues of oddly painted animals and creepy people.
Our first night was pretty boring – we just went for some bad fast food and spent some time online. The next morning, we took a couple buses to get out to the Recinto El Pensamiento, where we hoped to get a tour of the cloud forest sitting high above the city. Unfortunately, we showed up only to be told that the park was closed for a day off. It was a Tuesday. Colombian's work schedules have proven to be totally unpredictable.
We caught a bus back into the city and went down to the center to check out Manizales' contribution to the country's collection of big churches and plazas. The main statue in the central plaza, like so many in South America, is dedicated to Simon Bolivar. But while most depict Bolivar atop a triumphantly galloping horse, the statue here is a weird condor man on a column, with an oversized face mask of Bolivar jutting out the side halfway down.
The rest of the central city was like so many urban areas we've visited, a hodgepodge of random shops, markets, and general squalor. We walked around for a bit before heading back to our hostel, making some macaroni and cheese, and watching tv for a bit.
The next day we made our second attempt at visiting the park, this time with a group of three people from our hostel. They were open, thank goodness, and we got right into it with a guided tour. First we saw a medicinal plant garden containing plants and herbs used by indigenous Colombians. Our guide described each plant and what ailments it supposedly cured. In the middle of the garden, we came upon a coca plant and a marijuana plant, both legitimate members of the collection but odd to see being grown in an official capacity anyway.
From there we took a ski lift up over some thick forest, our feet brushing past the tops of the trees below.
At the top, our guide continued on, showing us a butterfly farm filled with too many butterflies to count, and on into the cloud forest.
We wound through a collection of orchids of all colors and sizes, many with names like the “Monkey Face Orchid” that described how they looked. Colombia has over 3500 varieties of orchids, the most in the world.
The tour ended at a mini zoo where they had Zebras, Llamas, and some crazy ostriches. We got up close and personal with the male ostrich, who twisted his neck around and snapped his beak neurotically for us and our friends before biting our camera lens.
We left the next day to venture further into the coffee region, to the tiny town of Salento.
Getting to Rio Claro isn't as clear as the river itself. There is no actual bus there. Rather, you have to get a ticket for a bus on the way to Bogota and then hop off on the side of the road before the bridge over Rio Claro. For a person who speaks Spanish, this might be a simple arrangement to make, but for us it is always a mix of confusion and doubt as to whether we are on the right bus and if we will be told when to get off or have to guess for ourselves. Luckily, after three hours of our bus weaving through endless green Andean mountains through tiny towns and past military checkpoints, the bus assistant guy waved back to us to get up and jump off the bus. It felt like we were being left in the middle of nowhere.
We followed a sign for the Rio Claro Refuge down a dirt road for about half a mile and came to the river, calmly winding its way through the humid jungle. Thanks to its white marble bed, the river is known for its clarity. There must have been recent rains though, because it was more of an opaque brown than clear, but beautiful nonetheless.
Sitting directly on the bank of the river was the Refuge, a big two story covered bamboo structure, with open walls and a Swiss Family Robinson vibe about it. We checked into a “private room”, and our stay included three meals for about $23. Our room had some simple and dreadfully uncomfortable beds and was basically an open balcony facing the river about twenty feet away. It wasn't excruciatingly hot, but the humidity had us sweating profusely all the same.
With a couple hours of daylight left, we hiked up the river along well-defined trails built by the refuge. An amazing variety of strange plants, bugs, and butterflies with six inch wingspans in a rainbow of colors densely packed the jungle as we moved along the cliffside path. We came to a spectacular cave under one of the cliffs, with huge stalactites hanging precariously from the ceiling.
Occasionally the trail would open up to a riverside beach with the exposed white marble bed smoothed and curved by the river flowing against it for so long. The massive walls of the canyon fired straight up from the opposite side of the river, decorated with vines and ferns. Besides a couple of kids out catching butterflies, we had the whole place to ourselves. Paradise.
The combination of encroaching darkness and seeing one too many big, fuzzy, black and orange deadly millipedes convinced us to turn around and head back to the home fort. We had a decent dinner, the same formula of soup, meat, rice, potatoes, and a salad that we always get, and hung out for a bit. We were in bed by 8pm. It was pretty hard to fall asleep due to the heat and the comfort level of the mattresses being the equivalent of a stack of notebook paper.
We woke up the next morning, had breakfast, and hiked back up the river the same way we had before. It was a different world in the morning sun, with the jungle illuminated much brighter that the previous afternoon. The river had also lived up to its name overnight, and now flowed crystal clear. We took another set of pictures in the better light, checking out the same sights as the previous day. At around 10:30am, we settled in on our favorite beach spot, opposite a waterfall coming out of a cave in the side of a giant cliff. There wasn't a soul around. We swam in the river, which was a little swift at that spot but dead calm thirty feet downriver. A rope net went up the waterfall, and Russ was able to swim across the river and climb up to the cave, which opened into a large, dark, spooky cavern. We sat in the river and skipped rocks for a couple hours, watching neon blue and yellow butterflies flutter by and talking about how glad we were to be in this private paradise so far from the daily grind of home.
Returning to Medellin was even more informal than leaving; we hiked back up the road and found some army guys who told us a bus would come along eventually. Sure enough, about 45 minutes later this random, rotten little bus came along, stopped quickly to let us on, and sluggishly delivered us back to the northern terminal of Medellin.
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.
There isn't much variance in the average meal. Usually called almuerzo (lunch) or menu del dia (menu of the day), this is the cheapest meal option. The standard almuerzo would start with a bowl of soup, followed by a plate with chicken or beef (sometimes at bigger places you get a choice), with rice, a fried plantain, a very small salad that is usually either tomatoes and onions or shredded cabbage, and beans. Occasionally they will surprise you by substituting spaghetti for the beans, and eggs for the meat. The soup has the biggest variety. Sometimes it is really plain, milky soup. Other times it is vegetable soup with lots of potatoes and corn. The most popular choice is random chicken or beef parts though - definitely off-putting. The one bright note of most almuerzos is the included juice drink. Usually a blended, icy fresh fruit juice, the most popular of which is mora (blackberry), we always would look forward to it. I got accidentally ordered cantaloupe a few times. That was no good.
Fast food in Colombia is terrible and expensive. Maybe this explains why there aren't a lot of overweight Colombians. The three types of fast food in order of popularity are pizza, hamburgers, and hot dogs. The pizza is god awful. The crust is bland, there really isn't any sauce, or at least not enough to detect the flavor, the cheese is very mild, rubbery mozzarella, and the pepperoni is flavorless and tough. Most pizza looks like it has been sitting out all day, and then they just heat it up for you. Unfortunately, when every other restaurant in town is shuttered, there will usually be a pizza stand or small shop still open, so we got stuck way too many times eating pizza because we were starving and got into a town too late for a real meal.
Hamburgers and hot dogs are even worse. Whereas pizza is usually bland but edible, more often than not when I attempted to eat a hamburger or hot dog, I would just end up throwing it away or giving it to Russ, who will eat almost anything. There are a couple problems with the hamburgers in particular. First, the patty is always a greasy, gray, freezer-burned and fried mess. The cheese is the same plastic mozzarella that they use on the pizza. Then, hot dogs and hamburgers have the same common problem, rendering them inedible: the toppings. For some reason, they always put this sickly sweet mayonnaise / ketchup mixture along with dried french onions on them. It is a bad combination that results in immediate regret after consuming.
The ketchup in Northern Colombia was super funky. Once we got south of Medellin, it was almost perfect. In the North though, it seems like restaurants try to make their own ketchup, and epically fail. It turns out to be like tomato jelly, a sweet, gelatinous, watered down, runny mess of a condiment.
Breakfast is the most reliable meal. It without fail includes eggs, usually scrambled, sometimes with tomatoes and onions, and toast or rolls. They will also throw in an arepa (corn meal biscuit). Russ liked the arepas, I didn't. To me they tasted like wet old popcorn.
No matter the meal, we would always ask for aji, the South American version of salsa or hot sauce. Aji is available at every restaurant, but can be either fresh or bottled. Fresh aji is awesome. It can be red with big chunks of tomatoes, onions, peppers and garlic, or green with everything but the tomatoes, served in a funny little bowl with a little spoon. Usually it is a little spicy, but never really hot like we would prefer. Nonetheless, it adds a lot of flavor to the rice, beans, salad, meat, and soup in almuerzos, so we would dump it on everything. About 50% of places we ate at made their own fresh aji. The other half the time they would serve bottled aji, a poor substitute for the real thing. Served in a Tabasco-sized bottle, and with a similar consistency, the flavor is never quite right. It is sort of spicy, but also sort of sour and not very appealing. Russ would go ahead and use it, but when we got bottled aji, I would pass.
Empanadas rock. We had a lot of different types of empanadas. They are basically a homemade hot pocket, deep fried breading with a filling. The most common filling was beef and potatoes or chicken and potatoes, but sometimes they would put in rice or cheese. Empanadas are almost always served with fresh aji, and sometimes accompanied by Salsa de Roja, the same sweet mayonnaise and ketchup concoction that is terrible on burgers and hot dogs but surprising awesome with aji on an empanada. They are usually sold by street vendors or at counters at snack shops. A few of these makes an acceptable substitute for a decent lunch, especially at bus stations, where they are usually the only hot food available.
At the grocery store they don't sell many US brands, but a couple things you can always find are Oreos and Doritos. Oreos are indistinguishable from their American counterparts. Doritos were hit or miss. Sometimes they would be perfect, and other times they would be super thin or completely lack the flavoring. One thing that is really popular is drinkable yogurt – they sell it everywhere – and it is delicious.
One funny quirk about traveling in South America is that you never know exactly how you are getting to where you are going until you are on the way. We left for Playa Blanca, a textbook Caribbean beach on an isolated peninsula about an hour from Cartagena by boat. Unfortunately, we didn't go by boat, figuring we would save a little money by taking a bus instead. Along with our new Australian friend, James, we grabbed a taxi from the hostel up to this ghetto outdoor market on the Southern outskirts of the city, where we grabbed a rotten 70's bus to the town nearest to Playa Blanca. There we got some bags of water and asked a few locals (all of whom were super dark Caribbean people) where to go next, and they pointed us down this dirt road through some miscellaneous shanties. At the end of the road, a guy was waiting with a rowboat, and took us across a wide channel to a dirt road on the other side.
Waiting there were three guys in their early 20's sitting on motorcycles. They explained that Playa Blanca was 18 kilometers away, and offered to take us for 70,000 pesos, about $35, a lot of money in Colombia. We talked them down to 50,000 pesos (still a rip off, but we were stuck otherwise), hopped on the back of the motorcycles, and took off down the rough dirt roads, swerving to avoid the larger rocks and potholes. The ride took about 25 minutes, all of which we spent desparately trying to stay balanced, fighting our heavy backpacks on the corners and clutching our five liter plastic bags of water with our sweaty arms.
Finally we arrived at the beach and the worth of the long trip there was immediately apparent.
The white sand beach stretched into the distance, curving along the florescent blue water, with the palm huts of restaurants and hammock shelters dotting down the coast. We walked down the beach a bit before settling in and renting a hammock from this really nice couple who also ran a tiny food stand and restaurant. We hung out the rest of the day on the beach, swimming in the warm water and sitting in plastic chairs under thatched roof canopies.
Periodically, groups of Caribbean women would come up trying to sell massages or trinkets. James spoke no Spanish and had a hard time insisting on saying no, and he paid the price. At one point we looked over and he had three women massaging him, one on each arm and one on his shoulders, while some weird guy was installing a rainbow-colored cloth braid in his hair. Yikes.
That night we had dinner and made a small fire on the beach, using coconut husks as kindling.
Waking up the next morning in my hammock was one of my favorite moments. I opened my eyes to see the ocean sparkling and tropical trees growing in the white sand. It looked like a Corona commercial. I stood up from my hammock and walked directly down and into the water. The perfect way to start the day.
We decided to take a boat back to Cartagena that afternoon rather than dealing with the motorcycle / rowboat / bus combination again. We paid $7 and got on a big cruiser boat, where we were able to sit on the deck and watch as we sped past the outlying fortified islands surrounding Cartagena. It was incredible to imagine huge fleets of pirate ships staging an attack, pushing in towards the city through a gauntlet of canons.
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