|
  | |  |
Ex Colombian Cocaine Capital
Entry 139 of 160 | show all | print this entry |
|
When we stepped onto the tarmac at Cartagena airport to walk to our plane we knew it was going to be an interesting ride. The little twin prop Fokker was smaller than the jets we´ve taken recently and as it had been delayed by a few minutes because of bad weather we didn´t think it augured well. We were right. The turbulence was so bad we both got off in Medellin and thought we were going to be sick. Jim looked decidedly green.
The taxi ride to our hostel took about half an hour as the airport is quiet a way out. We drove around the suburbs looking for The Black Sheep for about twenty minutes before we finally found it. When we did, we both collapsed on our dorm beds and waited for the nausea to subside.
After a while our dorm buddies came filtering in and we got to meet Guido, a Dutch guy who´s travelling for a few weeks after working in Argentina for a year, and Keiran, a bloke from Nottingham, who´s been away for three years. Both of them were near the end of their trips like us and they were both beginning to look forward to going home - a bit like us actually. Don´t get us wrong, we´re still having an amazing time, but little things like soft boiled eggs, a proper cup of tea and Marmite on toast are calling!
We were only staying in Medellin for two nights as there´s not an awful lot to see there. It was famous in the early 1990s as Colombia´s Cocaine Capital, but things have quietened down here considerably since then. The stories are pretty extraordinary though. At the height of the troubles teenage hitmen would settle scores for as little as $30 - something that probably accounts for the murder rate which stood at around 5,000 a year!
The main man in the area was the infamous former car thief Pablo Escobar. By 1983 he had an estimated wealth of $2 billion. He lived a very luxurious life, he set up his own political party and was even elected to congress. Along with other cartel bosses he tried to buy off the government when it decided to get tough on the lucrative drug trade and so offered an enticing deal which included a proposal to pay off the country´s entire foreign debt of $13 billion!
The government did a Nancy Reagan and "just said no" though. Not only did they rebuff this generous offer, but they also set out to assassinate Escobar. This they managed after a 499 day manhunt. He was found and shot dead in Medellin in December 1993.
One of the things you can do in the city is visit Escobar´s grave. We tried to do this, but despite mentioning it as a possibility in the guidebooks, neither of them actually give you very clear instructions, so once when we got to the graveyard - which is still very much in use - we couldn´t find his plot anywhere. It was like looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack and we were too embarrassed to ask any of the grieving relatives where we could find the arch criminal´s grave, so we came away without actually laying eyes on his tomb.
As well as wandering around the out of town cemetery, we visited the Museo de Antioquia. This was a great museum, but some of the exhibits were slightly scary. That´s because they were alive. There were two men wearing old tattered clothes and covered in black paint standing in separate glass boxes, posing stock still with mining tools. I´m not quite sure what the point was, but they scared the life out of me. I was busy commenting to Jim about how realistic the statues were when one of them blinked. I nearly jumped out of my skin!
The other works on display were mainly from Colombian artists - lots by local boy Ferdinand Botero again - that showed that the creative scene in this country is alive and well. After we´d looked around and had lunch in the museum, we walked around the town centre for a bit.
Paisos, as the residents of Medellin are called, are known throughout the country for their enterprise and hard work and so I suppose we shouldn´t have been surprised to see the mobile typing pools on the side of the road or the dozens of people wearing t-shirts advertising their mobile phones for use for a small fee. The other thing people here are known for is their unashamed embrace of plastic surgery (according to our guidebook all the fake boobs conform to the "drug dealer asthetic"), although I was disappointed not to see many shocking examples, but that´s probably because we didn´t go clubbing.
After our walk we took the metro to the Botanical Gardens. We wanted to see the annual orchid exhibition, but it turned out the whole area was a construction site as they´re building a new cultural centre or something. So as not to waste the journey we decided to continue out to the East of town on the metro and then take the new cable car up the hill.
Medellin is set in lovely surroundings - hills rise up on all sides and so the views on the way up were great. They would have been better had the weather been nice, but it was cool travelling in the pods, knowing that this wasn´t designed for tourists, but for the people living in the neighbourhood to get to and from the city centre.
On our ride back into town we got off at the Parque San Antonio to see another one of Botero´s vast bronze sculptures. This one, the Pajaro de Paz, or Bird of Peace, was slightly different though as it was very badly damaged in a massive car bomb explosion in the early 1990s. It killed scores of people. The artist donated another identical sculpture, but insisted the original remain in situ and so the two birds stand side by side. A poignant reminder of the city´s violent past.
It was after looking at these two works that we made our frustrating trip to the cemetery so after managing to get a taxi back to the end of the metro, I persuaded Jim to take me to the cinema. It was great. We checked the film would be in English with Spanish subtitles and then settled down with a massive bucket of popcorn to watch Halle Berry and Bruce Willis in a Perfect Stranger. We both really enjoyed it (we've been away from home too long - it was fairly trashy!) and it made up in part for not being able to watch DVDs on our laptop after it was stolen.
We got back to the hostel at about 9pm and although Medellin is supposed to be one of the party cities in Colombia, it was a Monday night and not many people looked like they were going to hit the town. So we grabbed a beer and while I settled in for a long internet session, Jim made some fine tweaks to our itinerary to see if we could squeeze two days on a coffee plantation into our plans.
|
|
If you like this entry, search for other entries from Colombia or try a new search. |
| |
Back to Entry - Back to Home
|
38 votes 
