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Behind Enermy Lines
Entry 6 of 24 | show all | print this entry |
Deep Behind Enermy Lines
Don´t Believe the Drug War Hype!!
This message comes to you deep behind the lines of everything Colobia is famous for guerillas, paramilitaries, terrorism, and of coarse Cartel based Coke wars...
And you know what... it´s all a load of sh*t!!
So lets get down to the real Colombia, and past all the media crap that we´ve all been fed, and admittedly even I bought into (late last year I could be heard playing Devil´s Advocate when Joseph was planning his 2 month trip to Colombia...
"Have you read the travel warnings man?? You´re crazy!! You´ll be kidnapped!!"
blah...blah...blah).
The Beginning
We left Quito in our usual Secret Garden style (read: after many Cuba Libre´s). Shawn and I spent our last night downstairs raiding MP3s from the hostel PC and fixing my IPOD (which the night before Shawn had taken the liberty of using and presenting me in the morning missing about 5000 songs!! Fortunately they were recoverable, and thus, fortunately Shawn is still living!!). We bailed out at about 3am for a bus to the border feeling confident that we had left the Garden in the good hands of a group of Canadians that included Brad Viejo (a regular at Down Town, Quito´s after hours bar, and therefore a worthy replacement - is more ways than I will go into!!).
I was woken on the bus by Shawn en-route to be confronted by a head-on bus accident on the road ahead (I can´t help but see this as a bad omen) between a local and tourist bus, both were in ruins and I hate to think of those on-board, but am once again confronted by the fragileness of life and how quickly it can disappear. I go back to sleep to uncomfortable dreams as the bus rocks me to sleep.
The border crossing was so easy and upon seeing the "Bienvenidos a Colombia" sign I am so tempted to run and by a Coke for a photo of my first Coke in Colombia (this time I manage to restrain the urge). We take off for Popayan and our first Colombian experience.
Popayan
Our first real intro to Colombia! Unfortunately the arrival a little tainted by the fact that despite our careful planning not to arrive at nightfall (guerilla activity is rife in the South) our bus decided to stop in Pasto and thus roll in under the cover of darkness (was interesting watching all the people, admittedly probably military, lining the road watching the buses with thoughts of highway robbery fresh on the mind!). Also the girl next to Shawn threw-up in a plastic bag which exploded (lovely I know... try getting it all over your bag!!) and our bus driver decided not to tell us we had arrived and almost drove us right out of town on the other side! Excitement aside Popayan is a fairly nice colonial town (all the buildings white-washed with red roofs) with distinct lack of tourists being one of the more noticeable attributes.
Highlight: Sitting in a small cafe and enjoying about 8 fine Colombian espresso´s and in a caffeine fueled blur madly catching up on some journal writing! Damn good coffee!
Cali Cartel Baby
I won´t lie to you!! Our guidebooks (both of them!) claim Cali to be the city with the most attractive women in Colombia. To verify this Shawn and I decided we had to come and judge for ourselves!! That and the fact that we wanted to be somewhere with a nightlife for a weekend and Cali seemed the logical choice (nothing to do with the guidebook facts above!). To tell you the truth I was not a big fan of Cali at all.
Firstly: Yes it is true that there are good looking women in Cali, but I certainly didn´t think it was worthy of guidebook entry.
Secondly: The nightlife sucked!! OK... perhaps I exaggerate. But there are HUGE clubs everywhere that could literally fit thousands of people and they all had about 10 people in them! On a tip we cruised out to Plaza Norte where the nightlife was apparently bumping. What we found in reality was a mall like complex that was filled with clubs in place of shops, each one as empty as the last! Strike Two Cali! Fortunately we met a couple of crazy coked out backpackers who swore they knew where the scene was at, and seemed just loco enough to belief, so we followed them to the electronica club Forum which was playing quality house music and had a rocking scene, in fact was the best club I have been to in Latin America (perhaps the well earned change from Reggaeton and Salsa music helped tip the scales), and we danced the night away (with occasional trips to our hidden bottle of Ron de Medellin) finally starting to see what all the Cali hype was about.
So that was Cali. Not the most exciting town, and in my opinion not worthy of the praise it gets for beautiful girls, but none the less if I ever start a T-Shirt label I am without doubt going to call it Cali Cartel Baby!
Colombian Trainspotting
From Cali we embarked on one of the most interesting trips I have ever done on the road out to San Cipriano. San Cipriano is a tiny little village (black community) in the middle of the Colombian Pacific jungle. The big attraction (apart from being a cool little place to chill out complete with jungle walks, and river for swimming and tubing) is the railway. Since there is no rail service available the locals have come up with ways to use the track using hand propelled, or motorbike powered carts! Our first experience of this was after being dropped on the side of the road by our bus by a couple of black guys who lead us to the track where we jumped on a small go-kart type set-up precariously balancing on the tracks. One of the guys then jumped on back and with a large stick started our kart moving down the tracks (explaining how the guy was so ripped!). What we did not yet realise was that San Cipriano was down track from where we stared, and though the gradient did not seem like much we were soon moving so quickly that the guy not only did not need his stick, but was crouched down holding onto us as we flew down the tracks. At this point had we hit a rock I would not be here to type this message right now! Add to this that earlier in the trip we had encountered motorbike propelled karts coming back the other way that we had to get off the tracks for (there was no way we could stop at this speed!) and you can begin to understand the adrenaline of shooting through the jungle on this kart. I will point out that at this stage jumping of a bus in the middle of the jungle and following a couple of guys to a kart to ride top speed through contested territory in Colombia is not what I would have picked myself to have been doing if you had asked me a couple of months ago!! Though what an experience!! Interesting to note as well the fact that this village was entirely made up of black people, while the more wealthy towns (such as Cali) are most definitely a white majority of European decent. I have not yet seen many indigenous Colombians. We made our way out of town to Buenaventura on one of the motorbike driven karts which went even faster and was just as crazy!
The Great Colombian Export
Now I know what some of you were thinking!! Wrong stimulant! Coffee people... Coffee!! In any case we made our way to Armenia in the heart of coffee country to sample some of Colombia´s finest and soak up the atmosphere of the region where it is grown. Armenia itself was a pretty crappy town, though Shawn and I were able to amuse ourselves by making it a mission to sample all the street food we could get our hands on (which would soon become a trademark feature of our Colombian diet) and were soon in the know on where to find the best Empanada´s, and deep fried meat/potato balls in the whole city! To really feel like we had visited the Zona Cafeteria we took a day trip out to Parque Cafe and walked around the fields where they grow the coffee, checked out the coffee museum (at this point I will point out that I think that a Colombian Cocaine museum would be far more interesting!), and again took it upon ourselves to drink coffee all afternoon and again catch up on some journal writing (quickly becoming a favourite past time).
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