Posts Tagged ‘medellin’

I’m not actually a very big fan of tango. There, I’ve said it. It’s very impressive to see, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to watch a show, and my entire time here I have never actually paid to see anybody dance it.

Having said that, I have written another post over on Medellin Living and this time it’s about tango.

Fernando Botero is a major force in Colombian artistic circles and his sculptures can be spotted in many cities in Colombia and around the world. I’ve done a little write up of some of the ones I spotted whilst there over on Medellin Living.

My latest guest post on how to survive long-distance bus travel in Colombia is now up on Medellin Living – you have my permission to go and read it there…

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What’s This?

Pablo Escobar’s grave in Jardines Montesacro cemetery, Itagui, Colombia. Click the photo to see it full-size. The inscription translates as:

Pablo Emilio Escobar Gaviria

Dec 1 1949 – Dec 2 1993

“When you see a good man try to imitate him; when you see a bad man take a look at yourself.”

No comment.

I recently offered my services as a contributor to Dave Lee’s Colombia site, Medellin Living and to my surprise, my services were accepted! My first post went up today – and more are on the way, so head on over there, take a look, there’s plenty of good stuff to check out.

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.