Archive for January, 2010

So, we turn up at the airport all excited this morning, ready to begin the jungle adventure. Monkeys here we come!! Except that our ticket is for the 30th and today is the 28th. Kinda put a damper on things…
But, guess what? The day after tomorrow I’m off to the jungle! Yay! Monkeys!

So I’ve got you all excited with a new blog design, loads of fascinating and insightful commentary to read and now I’m going to bugger off for a couple of weeks. Your disappointment is tangible.

This is not because I don’t love you – you know I do – but on Thursday we will be flying down to Leticia, which is slap-bang in the middle of the Amazon jungle and I’m not taking the laptop with me.

We don’t have an exact plan, but it involves lots of boats, very few roads and hopefully monkeys. I still haven’t seen a monkey in all the time I’ve been here and it’s starting to annoy me.

I shall resurface in Peru in a couple of weeks, so don’t worry if you don’t hear much in that time, I’ll be thinking of you…

Cocaine is a tricky thing. You can have as many high-profile ad campaigns promoting tourism as you want, place all the police you have on every street corner and generally clean your act up for both residents and tourists alike, but at the end of the day, people in the West, when they think Colombia, they think Cocaine.

Take Medellin, for example. If there is one city in South America, if not the entire world, that has a bad name it’s poor old Medellin. Infamous for the cocaine cartel of the same name that during the 1980′s was responsible for supplying 80%of the world’s cocaine, you’d think this would be a hard reputation to shake.

I read the book Killing Pablo several years ago – it deals essentially with the last few years of and hunt for, the cartel’s leader Pablo Escobar. At his most powerful and dangerous, towards then end of the 1980′s his organisation was responsible for 20 deaths a day, in Medellin alone. At the time of reading, I had no inkling that my travels would bring me to South America, let alone Colombia so the picture I had in my head was of a lawless town in a corrupt country – not somewhere I would ever considering visiting.

So it is a little surprising to find out that of all cities in Colombia, Medellin has done the most to break from the past and provide a modern and forward-thinking place for its population to live – and on the whole is doing a very good job of it.

One the first things you hear about Medellin, is that it has a Metro. Colombians from all over are proud of this, the people of the city even more so. Now, it’s not the Tube – it only has two lines, but given the layout of the city (basically lying from north to south in a wide valley), this gives a very wide coverage. Even better, and even more impressive is the MetroCable system. Being in a valley, barrios little more than slums creep up the mountains away from the centre on both sides (as opposed to Europe, in South America the rich live at the bottom and the poor live high up), so the good folk at the transport planning department of Medellin City Hall have come up with a most ingenious solution. Acting as another Metro line, 2 cable car lines link the train system with the top of the mountain, with 2 intermediate stops along the way.

As a tourist, this allows you to take a cable car to a 2 vantage points overlooking the city (and to see some genuinely poor neighbourhoods from above) of the bargain price of 50p, but much more importantly, it enables the folk living in these, frankly crappy, areas with very poor bus links (mainly due to living on a 45 degree slope) to easily get to work in the city proper. I was impressed.

Obviously it’s not just a cable car or two that’s going to turn a city round, but it demonstrates the kind of inclusive social thinking visible all around Medellin which is allowing it to move on from its murky past.

One last note, the ghost of Pablo is still present around the city with many of the shopping centres and even entire barrios having been built by him, his image of local Robin Hood was carefully cultivated. One stranger legacy however is the problem parts of Central Colombia are having with hippos. Professional hunters were dispatched to deal with the problem – with some success as this wonderfully headlined article tells us.

So, from Bogota we spent a couple of days in lovely colonial Villa de Leyva, about 4 hours north. On the way I got my first taste of Colombian bus drivers. In the cold light of day it’s one thing to sit here typing away and say that they drive like lunatics. It’s quite another when you’re sliding around on your bus seat, anything that you’ve been stupid enough to leave on the floor is at the other end of the bus, knocking against the ankles of the nice little old lady in the front seat. I began to dread the downhill bits (of which there were a lot, Villa de Leyva is 700 metres lower than Bogota) because on cresting the hill, you would feel the bus surge forward and the driver would begin cackling demonically as the roadside shacks would begin to blur, parts of the bus started breaking off under the extreme strain with the wheel rims glowing red.

Ok, Ok so I’m exaggerating a little bit. However, if I thought it was bad on the way to Villa de Leyva, it was nothing compared to the road between Bogota and Medellin. We had to dog-leg back to the capital to get to Medellin, which meant a good 15 hour bus day, but they weren’t that uncomfortable so I wasn’t too bothered about it. We left Bogota and after 30 minutes or so began down a curvy mountain road. The scenery was beautiful, the road taking us through thick forest and mountains as far as the eye could see. And it went on for hours like this – literally. Down, then up, the down again, all the time with hairpin bends every 50 metres. This of course did nothing to stop our bus driver from overtaking lorries, sometimes 2 or 3 at a time. I’ve never seen so many lorries in all my life, and of course we had to overtake them all. On blind bends. I’ve also never seen so many vultures in my life, there were trees full of em, just sitting there, waiting… it wasn’t very reassuring.

I wasn’t sure what to expect from Bogota.

Very much like Colombia itself, its reputation precedes it. It’s huge (9 million population), hard to travel around, some areas are total no-go areas for the average backpacker, and it’s cold, even in summer (mainly die to its height, after La Paz and Quito it is the 3rd highest capital in the world).

But, as is so often the case, I was pleasantly surprised. We stayed in the old Candelaria section, full of little cobbled streets and cute little houses. We wandered around the city centre, visited the Botero musuem, went up the Monserrate mountain for a view of the entire city, which really is bloody enormous and went on a steam train.

Like the vast majority of South America there are very few passenger train services in Colombia, but one that has survived is the Tren de la Sabana which goes twice a week from Bogota to the town of Zipaquira around 45km north of the city, from where you can visit the Catedral de Sal. As the name suggests it is a Cathedral built in an abandoned salt mine 180m below the surface.

But I enjoyed the train – a proper old steam engine, complete with 2 drivers covered in coal dust, it must be a real sight as it steams its way along the tracks in the centre of Bogota. About 5 minutes from station in Bogota we’d got a bit of speed up, on the home stretch when all of a sudden there was a lurch and the train screeched violently to a halt. After a minute or two a couple of nosy souls in our carriage decided to investigate, and came back all happy and announced that we had hit a horse. After another few minutes it became clear that we weren’t going anywhere soon so we jumped off and sure enough, lying on the tracks next to the train was half a horse. Not something I’d ever thought I would see, but there you go, you live and learn…

Wallet Garden is a very simple and neat idea, which could come in very useful for travellers (and non-travellers alike). Create an account using an email address and password and it allows you to save the emergency numbers and web addresses for your bank. No important details are saved, simply the banks contact details. So, should the worst happen and your cards go walkabout, all the numbers you need are one click away.

One thing that I have been asked a lot is whether or not Colombia is a safe place to be. For sure it does not have a good reputation for safety, and everyone has heard of FARC, Pablo Escobar and the fate of Ingrid Bettancur. So, it has a violent past, does that mean however that it has a violent present or future?

Certainly, if you read the UK Foreign Office page for Colombia you could be forgiven for thinking that it is not the best place for your holidays. The page is full of phrases such as “advises against travel in this region” and “caution must be taken”, not the sort of thing that inspires confidence. Read between the lines however and what it is saying is don’t go to remote, out of the way areas. Over a third of the country is essentially off-limits, an area the size of California, but this also happens to be covered with the Amazon rainforest where there are no roads or towns anyway.

Speak to locals and they will tell you things have got a whole lot safer under President Uribe who has been in power the last 8 years. Whatever they might think of his politics or his close dependence on the US in the fight against drugs, Colombia is a more secure place – there has not been a foreign tourist kidnapped since 2003, and only one tourist killed in the last 5 years (and that was a robbery gone wrong, not political).

The problem faced by tourists here (and although I use the term tourist, we are dealing mostly with backpackers of all ages) is street crime, which is everywhere. The hostel in Bogota had a list of common scams to watch out for, including fake policeman (and therefore fake fines), people trying to give you drugged cigarettes or beer and your common or garden pickpockets. Whilst this is a pain and something you have to be aware of at all times, to be honest it’s no different to Brasil, where the same rules apply. In the 5 days we spent in Bogota I did hear of one fellow traveller getting mugged, although in the end nothing was taken. However, we had been to the same place the day before and the hostel advised us to take a taxi (costing just over a dollar). He had been given  the same advice, but decided it didn’t apply yo him so he walked AND took a shortcut down an alley between two houses and he got mugged. I won’t say I told you so, but… No, it’s not the same as a week’s holiday in the Dordogne, but it’s really no worse than anywhere else in South America.

The major difference with Colombia compared to say, Brasil is that there are Police EVERYWHERE, and Real Armed Police, not Fake Police. Laura and I went on a tourist train from Bogota to a town 50k north of the city, and 3 armed police came along for the ride. They’re on the buses, outside banks, on street corners. It does give you a small sense of security, one which you don’t get in Brasil. If that weren’t enough, not only do you get Police guarding major points of interest, but you also get the Army, soldiers with really big guns. This is especially obvious on the main roads between towns, which historically have been areas owned by the guerilla groups, giving them free rein to hijack lorries and the occasional bus. Not so much anymore.

The thing with Colombia is that you need to stay on the beaten track. The government has launched a major, high-profile advertising campaign attempting to lure tourists to the country (it has the rather unfortunate slogan: Colombia – the only risk is that you’ll want to stay, which I always read as: Colombia: the only risk is that you’ll be made to stay) and investment is happening everywhere, and in order for that to work, the country has to be safe. Don’t go off into rural areas, do follow the advice of locals and stay aware of your surroundings – you might get your camera nicked, but apart from that you’ll just have a wonderful time.

But, you don’t have to take my word for it, thoughts on the same subject from a hostel owner who’s been living here six years.

Having spent a very nice Christmas and New Year with the family, yesterday I arrived in Bogota. One of the first things you I like to do when arriving in a new city is try to figure out roughly where things are and how to get around, so when Laura gave me a Tourist Map of Bogota, I had a flick through to see what was what.  The back of the map contains lots of useful information including the following advice about Street Addresses:

Moving around Bogota is easy. The two mountains Monserrate and Guadalupe are the reference point. The carreras (KR) run parallel to the mountains North-South, and numbers increase from East to West. The calles (CL) are perpendicular to the mountains, and numbers increase from South-North. A transversal (TR) is similar to a carrera, and adiagonal (DG) is similar to a calle. The avendias are denominated (AK) when the correspond to a carrera, and (AC) when they a correspond to a calle. The avenidas also can be distinguished by a name, for example: Avenida Cuidad de Quito.

Got it?