- Monday November 20th
No breakfast included at this hostel, which I actually kind of like. That means we won’t be tempted to eat anything unhealthy. We had big bowls of steel cut oats with cinnamon, raisins, walnuts and bananas.
Every time we move to a new location, I check Happy Cow to find out if there are any interesting vegan or vegetarian restaurants around. Our hostel happens to be located about half a mile from a really good vegan restaurant, so we walked there for lunch. The restaurant is called El Arból de La Vida (Tree of Life). I don’t know if it’s always been 100% vegan (it is now), but their logos on the windows says they’ve been around since 1982! They only serve a meal of the day and they are only open for lunch. For less than $5 we got a choice of juice or oat milk, soup (corn, pumpkin and plantain stew), the main dish, dessert and herbal tea. The food was really good, with lots of unique and exciting flavors that we are no longer used to, like fennel and basil. There aren’t many spices or herbs available in the grocery store, and most of the traditional food seems to be seasoned with just salt and pepper. After lunch we walked to the downtown area to take a walking tour.
The walking tour was actually quite long. It started a little after 2, and went until after 6. It didn’t feel long though and was interesting. We learned about this history of Medellín, starting with the Spanish in the 1600s, and it’s various economic booms, the main ones being gold and coffee. We also learned about the violent side of Medellín history and how the city managed to change from being one most dangerous cities in the world during the height of narco trafficking to one of the safer places to visit. It’s kind of hard for me to understand all of the history not having known any of it really before we came. Cocaine was big business in Colombia as a whole, and several cartels operated around the country, the Medellín Cartel being one of the most powerful. Pablo Escobar was one of the leaders of the cartel and is also the most famous and well known. He’s known for being one of the richest and most violent criminals in history. He began his cocaine business in the 70s and kept it going into the early 90s. He was making millions of dollars per day and sending tons and tons of cocaine to the US. It’s estimated he may have been responsible for as much as 80-90% of the cocaine in the United States at various times. In order to keep his business going he bribed or threatened anyone standing in his way. He actually gave a cash reward to his hitmen for every policeman they killed, and over 600 policemen died this way. During the peak in the late 80s and early 90s Medellín was a scary place to be. It was deemed the murder capital of the world, with an average of 17 murders per day in 1991. Pablo Escobar was shot and killed in 1993 after 16 months in hiding. In the years since his death peace agreements have been put into place, and the city has used what is called democratic architecture to revive the city. They built Colombia’s only metro system in the early 2000s, it’s a symbol of pride for residents. They also built cable cars to connect the poor communities of the steep hillsides to the rest of the city. They built big beautiful libraries throughout the city and safe public spaces, like parks with statues, monuments and art. They went from having less than half a million foreign visitors 15 years ago to more than 5 million last year. They love seeing foreigners, because it’s proof that the city has changed. When people see us in the streets they want to talk to us in any English they know and to help us however they can. Our guide Julio, who is in his 30s, grew up in Medellín. He says that he hopes to one day lose the burden of all of the stereotypes people have for Colombia, and to one day be able to travel and not have someone ask about cocaine! The small amount of cocaine that remains in Colombia (instead of being exported) is here primarily for the tourists that come looking for it. For the most part Colombians want nothing to do with the drug. Cocaine is like coffee the high quality stuff gets exported.
The walking tour took us all around the downtown area. It was very crowded with people selling all sorts of things. We walked down one narrow street with table after table full of very graphic pornograhic DVDs. We visited one of the oldest churches in the city where the ladies of negotiable affections hang out to offer their services. We visited a mall full of cheap clothing that actually gets manufactured in Colombia. We saw a variety of street food for sale. We would often sit down for a lecture from Julio or form circles on the street and listen to him talk. Julio liked making the circles because locals get curious and try to push their way into the circle and listen, like he’s a street performer and we’re watching something really good. On one such occasion sitting in a park, we attracted a lot of attention (our group of 25 gringos) and a young man selling candy asked Julio how to sell his candy to us in English. Julio told him, but asked him to wait until he was done with his talk. So for the next 15 or so minutes the candy man patiently waited with a huge grin on his face, and we watched while he practiced and rehearsed. At the end everyone bought a 5¢ candy from him. It was pretty fun. He even got in our group picture, proudly displaying his bag of candy.
About midway through the tour we took a snack break, and we asked Julio where we could find arepas de chocolo because I can’t get them off my mind! Unfortunately there were none around, but he promised to show us a place at the end of the tour, and indeed he did. So for dinner we ate multiple delicious arepas de chocolo.
We took the metro back to our hostel because it was after dark at this point. It’s a really good easy to use system. It costs about $1 per ride.
Although it rained a little during the tour, and the clouds are still with us, it was warm. We are at the lowest elevation we have been on the whole trip, about 5,000 ft. Medellín is known as the city of eternal spring because it has such a pleasant climate year round. Our hostel only gave us a sheet for our bed, and we thought that was kind of strange, after all the heavy blankets we’ve been sleeping with, but it was plenty warm.
My allergies started to go away in Manizales and are now fully gone. Whatever was bothering me was definitely in Salento.
Here are some cool facts about Colombia, so you can know about more than just the cocaine!
Colombia ranks second in the world for biodiversity, behind Brazil which is 10x bigger. It has more bird species than any other country. It terms of the diversity of its people, only Brazil has more diversity. Body image is very important here and curves are highly sought after, making Colombia one of the highest ranking countries when it comes to plastic surgery procedures. Colombia is the only country with both Pacific and Caribbean coastline. Colombia has jungles, deserts, tropical beaches, and high snowy mountains, glaciers, volcanoes and ancient ruins. Most of the worlds emeralds are mined in Colombia.
- Tuesday November 21st
We had a big breakfast this morning, a guanabana, banana and pineapple smoothie plus a bowl of steel cut oats with walnuts and raisins. Hoping to be full for hours, we set off to visit Parque Arví, a big nature park on top of a mountain above the city. You get there by taking the metro and then transferring to two different cable cars. We gained over 3,000 feet of elevation on the cable cars. On the ride we passed over the poor neighborhood. They are easily identified because they are built from the cheapest material possible, these hollow red bricks, like cinder blocks, but much less sturdy. They are all built one attached to the other. It’s interesting that the poor people live in the hills. It’s usually the opposite in the US, where you pay extra for a view. The cable cars were built so the residents here could have easy access to the city and the metro system. The roads are so steep through these neighborhoods that they don’t get bus routes coming through, so what used to be a 2 1/2 hour commute for some of them is now down to 15-30 mins. You swipe your metro card at the cable car and can go anywhere within in the metro system.
The second cable car that goes up and over the mountain to the park is an extra fee of 5,200 pesos each way ($1.75). As we went we watched the houses begin to thin out and the landscape began to look more farm like, then eventually we reached the ridge of the mountain and there was no more development. We rode for awhile longer at a constant elevation until we reached the center of the park. It wasn’t exactly what we were expecting. It was very commercialized, with a gift shop and food court the moment you get out, and all of the trails were closed unless you took a guided tour. The tours were cheap, at less than $2 per person but we’d rather just take a walk by ourselves and not have to listen to a Spanish speaking guide and walk with a group.
In the end we decided to do the guided walk. It didn’t leave until 1:30, so to kill time we ate lunch. We got some fresh mixed berries that came topped with blackberry and chocolate sauces and we each had a tamale with a side of plantains. The tour consisted of walking down a stone paved road to the edge of the mountain where the cable car starts to lose elevation. There we saw a small lake that is close enough for the young people from the neighborhoods below to hike up to for a swim. We looked over the edge of the mountain at the view of the city, and then the skies opened up and it poured. It poured and hailed for about 20 mins. Just long enough to make the trails and road run like rivers and long enough to thoroughly soak us and our shoes. We had our rain jackets, umbrella and shorts on, so it wasn’t really that bad. There were only 2 other people on the tour with us and they had no rain jacket or umbrella. They were being pelted so hard by the hail, that the guide gave them his hat and a plastic bags to put over their heads for protection. We were supposed to have walked back on an actual trail but the trail would have been a runny mess, so we went back the way we came, never actually getting to walk in the forest. In all we walked about 2 hours, at least we got some exercise and fresh air. With swamp feet we got back on the cable car and returned to town. Even though the “hike” wasn’t great, it was really neat to ride the cable car to the wilderness. You can drive there also, but instead of it taking 15 minutes, it takes 1 1/2 hours!
On the ride back, we exited the metro a few stops early for some more arepas de chocolo! (Chocolo is the word used to describe sweet corn specifically, there are many different words for corn.) It got pretty cold when it was raining, so we got our cold therapy in and burned a lot of calories. We built a good appetite for arepas! Rather than buying the prepared ones, I decided to get a whole packaged bundle of them, an excellent value at 9 of them for less than $1.75. We ate one of those and also got a prepared arepa de queso to try. That one cost $1, so buying the bundle of plain ones really is a good deal! The cheese one ended up being mostly cheese with a thin wrapping of white corn arepa around it. It is eaten with sweetened condensed milk on it!! Sweetened condensed milk is about as common in Colombian cuisine as cheese is!! We didn’t love the cheese arepa, but we are glad to have tried it.
It’s always dangerous to sit down anywhere, because without fail someone has to come and talk to us!! This time it was a couple that makes money selling puzzles and decorative items made out of wire. They invested a lot of time in us, showing us their various puzzles and how they worked, all the while creating a wire figure of our initials. We felt compelled to by something, it’s better than the people that just straight up ask for money or food, so I got a key chain and Jeff got shape shifting wire toy. I know they have a name, but I can’t think of it! People ask for money and food from us all the time, for example, we walk out of the grocery store with a banana and someone will yell out, “hey give me a banana!” or when we had those baby potatoes yesterday someone told us to give them the potatoes. We just walk away.
Rather than pay to get back on the metro again, we just walked back to our hostel from there. It was about a half hour walk at sunset through the area of town that specializes in auto repairs. We stopped off at the giant grocery store on the way and got some supplies for dinner. We had a healthy pasta salad containing quinoa pasta, lettuce, the cutest tiny tomatoes I’ve ever seen (called pearl tomatoes), avocado, cucumber, lime, mustard and cumin. We also got canned garbanzo beans. This grocery store is the first one that has had them! It was a really good dinner. The seasoning sounds kind of strange, but lime, mustard and cumin are staples in our limited flavoring options.
- Wednesday November 22nd
After just 3 days worth of bus travel, we decided we’d had enough. I looked into air travel to our next destination, because we heard it’s cheap. Cartagena is our next major destination, it’s 13 hours away by bus. It’s all the way on the Caribbean coast, but there aren’t any tourist destinations along the way. Two years ago when our guide book was printed, the cost of a bus ticket was $45. I’m sure like everything else has, the price for that ride has gone up too, so it’s at least $45 to take the bus. But for $60 (including a checked bag) we can fly there in an hour!! I booked a ticket for next Tuesday the 28th, which was by far the cheapest day to fly. Then I set to work booking hostels and making plans for some over night trips from Medellín.
Today we leave our hostel for the small mountain village of Jardín. It is a 3 hour bus ride away and is a very popular weekend destination for Colombians. With bellies full of arepas de chocolo (and PB banana smoothie), we left the hostel by taxi for the bus station.
We got up much earlier than planned thanks to an oblivious German girl having a very loud Skype conversation right outside our door and window. I seriously hate Skype and want to punch everyone I see using it! I don’t get Skype! Why do you have to look at the other person you’re talking to?? Why not just have a normal phone conversation at a reasonable volume. There are so many rude people in hostels.
We were riding away in the bus by 9 AM. It ended up taking more that 3 hours to get there, but the ride wasn’t too terrible. The traffic on the road was light, so there wasn’t much need for the driver to go into maniac mode and start passing people. The road was narrow and curvy though, and it seems to be the habit of all Colombian drivers to constantly alternate between extreme gas and extreme brakes. They don’t know the concept of a smooth ride. By the end of the bus ride I felt lousy and hung over. It’s unfortunate that every bus ride, no matter how short or how early of a start we get, seems to render us useless for the rest of the day.
A number of salesmen boarded our bus early in the ride. Every couple of minutes a new one would get on. Like the food vendors, they don’t appear to pay for ride the bus, but sometimes they give a freebie to the driver. They get on the bus with a messenger bag full of crap and stand at the front giving their sales pitch. When they have finished, they walk through the bus and hand out their item for each person to look at. They wait a few minutes, then walk back through to collect their money. Amazingly people actually buy the stuff. We had a sales pitch for a 5 pack of pens and pencils, some beaded necklaces and marijuana-coca-arnica pomade. We always refuse the stuff when they come through to pass it out.
There aren’t many hostels in this town, only two that I know of. The one I chose is called Canto de Agua and is a 20 minute walk from where the bus drops off. Down a hill and back up another, then a little further along a dirt road in a nice spot along a river with greens hills and farms and the whistle of birds all around. We’d always rather stay in a hostel than a hotel because hostels tend to be more accommodating of English speaking travelers, they seem to offer good support in terms of telling us what there is to do around and how to do it and they generally always have a kitchen we can use.
On the walk Jeff got a pulled muscle type pain in his chest. He’d been having a similar pain in his shoulder the last few days that finally went away, and now this. The location of it made breathing quite painful because it causes the muscle to stretch, so it was a long, slow and hot walk. We finally have sun today, the first full sun of our trip! Jeff is also suffering from a cold right now, so he’s not doing so well.
We ate lunch when we reached the hostel. I had packed salad from Medellín and we ate the remaining arepas de chocolo.
We were useless the rest of the afternoon. Lounging in the nice hammocks, on the lovely balconies of our hostel, listening to the pleasant sounds of nature and admiring the surrounding greenery and marveling at the presence of the sun. We took a walk back in to town for a few groceries, but that was it. I got a 5 pack of really huge preservative free local arepas for less than 50¢. The local kind of arepa is similar to a thick tortilla and is made of just yellow corn and water. We got some fruit for a smoothie, some ginger for making fresh ginger tea (for sickness), and since produce is 20% off on Wednesday, we stocked up on 3 kinds of potatoes for Thanksgiving (2 lbs worth), some carrots, a plantain and some garlic. All of this set us back $2.75! I continue to be amazed by the low cost of food.
For dinner we ate beans (that I stewed for hours and hours in our hostel in Medellin last night) and an arepa. I will be very pleased the day that I find a pressure cooker in a hostel again!
- Thursday November 23rd
Unfortunately Jeff is not feeling any better today and did not sleep well, so we stayed at the hostel all day, and he spent most of the morning and afternoon napping.
The hostel amazingly has a vegan breakfast! Chickpea scramble, a pancake and sliced bananas are plated up by the kitchen lady and oatmeal, cereal and oat milk is available self serve, in addition to a nice “juice” (thin smoothie) of tree tomato and sugar. There is also tea and coffee and I think hot chocolate, but the kitchen lady keeps that in her special area, so I’m not certain. While we were eating a Jeep pulled up and an older man got out and told everyone Happy Thanksgiving. His statement was met by blank stares. We, as usual, are the only Americans in the hostel. We got a chance to talk to him and found out that he is the owner. He’s from the US and moved here 4 years ago. He just opened up this hostel in February. He’s a vegan too, and said he initially struggled with complaints from some guests about the vegan breakfast, but now he just doesn’t advertise what it is and the people eat it and enjoy it and get curious about it and ask questions, instead of having a bad attitude from the start about something they know nothing about. 😜 This is definitely the best hostel breakfast we have ever encountered! We could eat everything, and none of it was unhealthy!
I have a hard time relaxing and just sitting around, so I was a bit bored today while Jeff slept. I was quite behind on blogging and got caught up though, so that was nice. Although I really like the hostel, the people staying here seem kind of strange. It’s hard to tell who is a paying guest and who is a freeloading volunteer. There have been 4 different guys at the front desk, only one of whom is a native Spanish speaker and appears to be a local that is paid to be here. There are also 4 or more other questionable people hanging around as well, that sort of seem like they are living here long term. One couple sells makes and sells jewelry and has a display of it set up in the hostel. I think of people like this as gypsies, in the same category as street musicians. We see lots of people who fund their travels this way. Good for them, I guess. It is common for hostels to use a volunteer workforce to some extent, but never have in l seen so many of them. It actually seems the volunteers out number the paying guests.
There is a new vegan restaurant in town that we had planned to go to today, but we hadn’t anticipated Jeff still feeling lousy. He slept through lunch and didn’t have much of an appetite. Since all I did was sit around since breakfast, I just had an arepa with peanut butter and guava jelly for lunch. The Colombians would be appalled by my use of the arepa!!
By dinner time, Jeff was finally a little hungry, so I boiled some ginger for tea and used the ginger water to make hot chocolate. We ate that with a peanut butter and honey arepa as an appetizer. For our main dish we had mashed potatoes and carrots with garlic, more leftover beans and some boiled sweet plantains. We could only eat half of it. The rest will be for tomorrow’s dinner. I estimate each serving to cost about 50¢! Eating like a peasant is the best! The potatoes here are so good, extremely creamy without any added fats. We will have to eat more potatoes in the future. I have a feeling we will end up leaving Colombia before I have my fill of the foods! Hopefully I continue to find nice produce in Central America, the arepas will sadly be gone though! 😫
Because it’s Thanksgiving, we gave some thought to what we have to be thankful for. Traveling gives you a different perspective and causes you to appreciate life at home a lot more, especially the little every day things that most people just expect and take for granted. Here are some things we are thankful to have in the US: We are thankful for hot water in sinks and showers, and showers that maintain a constant pressure and temperature. Those are very rare here! We are thankful for the abundance and variety of food we can buy in any grocery store at any time of the day. I am thankful for plant based yogurts and ice cream (those don’t exist here)! We are thankful that when we go out to eat we can choose any world cruise we can think of. We are thankful for the well constructed roads and the interstate highway system and for the mostly smooth drivers that drive those roads! We are thankful for the opportunity to get into our car whenever whenever want and drive wherever we want to! We are thankful for the free, abundant and clean public restrooms! It’s also great getting to flush the toilet paper! We are also thankful to be able to speak English and always understand and be understood. We are also thankful to once again have the opportunity to travel and experience new things and see a different way of life.
- Friday November 24th
We lounged around the hostel until after noon, at which point we took a slow walk in to town to eat lunch at the vegan restaurant. They are the only vegan (or vegetarian) restaurant in town, and specialize in breakfast and brunch. I had a smoothie bowl and hot chocolate with plant milk and Jeff had a smoothie and a little tart that was more dessert like than he thought it would be. The food wasn’t anything special, but it’s nice to support a new vegan restaurant.
After lunch we decided to take a walk. Jeff’s cold is going away, but the muscle pain remains. As long as he doesn’t breathe heavily he is ok. There’s a lot of hiking around here, and several view points, but in an effort to keep it easy on Jeff, we took a cable car to the top of one of them and walked back to town. The cable car was a rickety old wooden box that fits 4 people. There is only one car that goes back and forth across a river valley. It’s a short cut for the people that live in the hills. We rode with 2 school girls who were on their way home. The walk back took us about an hour at a slow pace and took us past waterfalls, a swift flowing river, lots of pretty flowers and trees and fields of coffee and bananas. It was a very pleasant walk. It was nice to get out and do something.
I always try to cook our meals in the hostel kitchens at off peak times to avoid the crowding that can happen in the often cramped kitchens. This means we generally eat an early bird dinner! Tonight’s dinner was easy to prepare, just a reheating of yesterday’s leftovers (potatoes, beans, plantains) with the addition of steamed cauliflower, sliced tomatoes and an arepa. We shared a dragonfruit and a small papaya for dessert. These additions to our meal cost about $1!
- Saturday November 25th
We returned to Medellín this morning. So I didn’t do much photo taking of town and we didn’t go back to the vegan restaurant. The ride wasn’t too terrible. One notable event during the ride was the boarding of our bus by the arepa de chocolo man! We were able to purchase the exact replica of the giant arepa we missed out on during the ride from Manizales. It was everything I dreamed it would be, like eating a whole loaf of sweet cornbread. I was so overjoyed, I could not stop smiling! 😁
We spent the afternoon lounging in our new hostel, Black Sheep. It’s in a more fancy area of town than the last hostel. The area is called as El Poblado, which is located in what’s known as the Zona Rosa. All of the bigger cities have a Zona Rosa, which is the area of shopping and night clubs. Those aren’t really big interests of ours! We save a lot of money when we travel by not buying and accumulating crap and also by not drinking. I heard that it’s interesting to walk around here at night though, so that’s why we are here.
We waited for dark, then went out to dinner at Lenteja Express, a vegetarian restaurant. We shared a veggie burger, veggie hot dogs (made of lentils) and criolla potatoes. The most exciting part of the meal was getting to try a vegan (soy milk) version of the Colombian oatmeal drink and also horchata (that’s a Mexican rice drink). Both drinks taste identical with cinnamon flavor and perhaps clove, but one is based on rice and the other oatmeal. Our food was really good, and super cheap, less than $10 total, including a tip.
The restaurant was about 3/4 of a mile from our hostel. We explored the area by taking a different route back. We passed club after club with blaring music, tons and tons of hip restaurants and scantily clad overly hip young people. We felt very out of place, but it was indeed interesting.
On the way back we stopped at the grocery store, another mega super center, even more overwhelming than the last one we visited. It’s like super wal-mart mixed with a department store like Macy’s or Sears. They sell everything you could imagine, clothing, appliances, housewares, sporting goods, etc. Even though they don’t celebrate Thanksgiving here, we’ve been seeing ads for “Black Week” and “Black Weekend” sales. They actually have those names in English. I wonder if the people know where the term comes from. Our hostel doesn’t have breakfast, so we picked up some items for tomorrow morning. Luckily for Jeff, I didn’t make us go up and down every single aisle. (He is mostly feeling better now, and luckily able to take walks like normal now.)
- Sunday November 26th
A week or so ago, I was searching the internet for mashed plantain recipe and came across a dish called mangú, a side dish that is part of the traditional breakfast in the Dominican Republic. It’s a simple preparation of boiled and mashed green plantains that are topped with pickled onions. That’s what we had for breakfast, and it was delicious. I also boiled some yucca and some lentils to take with us on the bus. We are leaving Medellin again today. This time for the weekend getaway destination of Guatapé, 2 hours away. Our hostel there won’t have a kitchen, so I planned ahead with some food for dinner. Guatapé is located on the shores of a huge reservoir and is famous for a big granite dome rock with very scenic views at the top.
To get to Guatapé we took the metro to the north terminal and bought tickets for the bus. While we waited for the bus we decided to try out a smoothie place called Cosechas. I have seen them everywhere on this trip. They are a big chain, but recently all of the Vitamix blenders they have caught my eye! Blenders are really common down here, since everyone makes blended tropical fruit juice. There’s been one in every hostel we’ve stayed in so far, but they have all been the Oster beehive style blenders, and that seems to be what most of the street vendors use too, so I was exited when I saw Vitamix blenders! They have an expansive menu of smoothies and one category called green smoothies! I have been deprived of greens and real smoothies, so I was so pleased! Now I’m going to be addicted and will be very sad to lose Cosechas when we leave Colombia. I chose a smoothie containing bell pepper, carrots, celery, parsley, ginger, pineapple and orange. Jeff got watermelon, strawberry and lemon. They have a special machine that seals a lid on to the cup, the same way yogurt is packaged.
The bus ride didn’t make us ill. We were on a smooth multi lane high way for half of the ride! When we were almost to Guatapé, the arepa de chocolo man boarded the bus with a big black plastic garbage bag full of them! We of course had to have one! Unfortunately it wasn’t as spectacular as the last one, but we still ate it. We never throw away food. I can vividly recall and count on my hands the number of times we have had to throw away food in the last year! (It usually only happens when I get a bad piece of produce from the store.) This is also a great way to save money while traveling.
Our new hostel in Guatapé is called Casa Encuentro. It’s on a hill above town with a nice backyard and lake view. It’s called a hostel, but is more like a bed and breakfast. We arrived a few hours before sunset, and since it’s Sunday, lots of Colombians are out and about, so we took a walk around town to have a look. We walked the half mile or so of the waterfront, past a continuous line up of food and souvenir vendors. Across the street was a continuous block of waterfront tourist trap restaurants, all with the same menu of regional specialties. It’s hard to imagine how they all stay in business! This town is also known for the frescos and colorful paint that decorate the houses. Frescos are these 3 dimensional sculptures that are done in bands across the ground level of the houses. We walked though the narrow streets admiring all of the different cartoon like depictions.
- Monday November 27th
Our hostel does an over the top breakfast. It’s really more of a B&B than a hostel. They serve fruit with yogurt and granola, toast, sweet bread and omelets. Most people complain that it’s too much food. Not wanting to eat all of the animal products, but also not wanting to miss out on “the best breakfast ever,” I emailed before we got there to ask if they might be able to accommodate a vegan breakfast or if I should bring my own. They emailed back and told me I should bring my “complete” breakfast. They don’t have a kitchen for us to use though, so that’s kind of silly. They ended up trying in the end, giving us the plate of fruit, along with some French fries. Even though the toast and granola are vegan, we didn’t get any of that. Strange! Not many people down here really understand what vegan is and they have a really hard time grasping why any one would choose to eat that way.
After breakfast we took a long walk to the rock. We took a back road from our hostel that wraps around some of the arms of the reservoir, past farms and country homes. It was about 5 1/2 miles and took us almost 2 1/2 hours to reach the bottom of the rock. It’s costs $6 per person to access to stairway up the rock and took us about 15 mins to climb the 740 steps to the very top. They claim to have the best view in the world! It was definitely pretty, but look kind of artificial and strange, because it is! I think there are many other natural views that are better! It’s really strange that people come from all over the world to see this view and climb the stairs. At the top and bottom of the rock, there are of course tons of souvenir and food sellers. There are even complete restaurants with chairs and tables and refrigerators, etc. It’s interesting to think about how they got it all up there. For the way back down you take a separate staircase that is behind the outer (going up) stairs. Both sets of stairs are built into a crack in the rock.
Back at the bottom we enjoyed a “mango biche” popsicle. Mango biche is the mango ceviche with lemon and salt. The popsicle has chunks of mango frozen into lemon/lime juice and even came with salt packets that we didn’t use. After I bought the popsicles I saw a Cosechas (Vitamix) smoothie stand, so we got a smoothie too. I ordered spinach, pineapple, banana and beet. I tried to ask for it without the stupid plastic lid, but the employee told me that the whole process is somehow tied into the computer, and you can’t not seal a lid onto it!
For lunch we went to the only vegan restaurant in Guatapé, Govindas. This was our first visit to a Govinda’s and we have learned that what they all have in common is that the owners are Hare Krishna followers. An old man, who we presume to be the owner, sat with us through our entire meal talking in Spanglish about all sorts of things. He’s been vegetarian 42 years, and the people around here don’t believe that. They all think that if he really was vegetarian, he would have died a long time ago of malnutrition! He told us Panamá is the only country without a Hare Krishna restaurant. He even wrote out a list of strange Hindu names that we should give to our future children, such as Yamunadavi! We got the meal of the day, green bean and cabbage soup, yellow rice, salad, sprouted beans, a cookie with guava jelly, and mango juice. We also ordered kombucha. It’s the first time we’ve seen it. The old man told us he got the scoby from the Mapuche Indians in Chile.
One interesting thing he told us is that the airport is on the drive back to Medellín, about half way. We are flying tomorrow, and had planned to spend the day in Medellín and take a shuttle to the airport in the evening for our flight, but we didn’t realize where the airport was located. This gave us some thinking to do, as we could spend 2 less hours on the bus if we take the bus straight from Guatapé to the town where the airport is, an hour away. Or spend 3 hours on the bus by riding the whole way to Medellín, then an hour back to the airport.
After lunch, we took a walk around town to take photos of the pretty buildings. We also went to buy chocolate. Cacao is grown nearby, and this is the first place we have seen nice dark chocolate.
We lounged in the hammock hut at our hostel until dinner. I would have liked to make dinner, but since there’s no kitchen here, I didn’t try. We went out to a restaurant called Don De Sam. The owner is Indian and we overheard him telling the people at the next table over that he travels to Indian every two months to get spices. Here in Colombia salt and an MSG laden “complete seasoning” liquid called Maggie (brand name) are the main ingredients in food flavor. There are lots of vegan options at the restaurant and not just Indian, also Mexican, Chinese, Thai, Colombian and more. I had Indian (aloo gobi) and Jeff had Mexican (veggie fajitas). Our food was really good and probably the best service we have had in a restaurant. We had the house special tropical juice to go with our meal. It was made of 5 tropical fruits, exactly which ones was a secret, but it was the most delicious smoothie drink we have ever had! The “juices” always have an abundance of sugar. This one was almost sickeningly sweet. We are getting a little sick of sugar, and we rarely eat any actual desserts!! We both keep fantasizing about our future arrival to Mexico and the abundant Mexican food that will be eaten!
Tuesday November 28th
We woke up to rain, so the decision to leave Guatapé was easy. We went back to Medellín like we’d planned to do all along, even if it meant a little more time spent on the bus.
We didn’t have a ton of time in Medellín, really just long enough to store our bags at the bus terminal and take the metro back to El Poblado for another delicious meal at Lenteja Express and find some street foods to enjoy. I bought a 5 pack of arepas de chocolo because we are leaving the mountains and may not see that type of arepa again! 😫
We got to the airport with tons of time to spare before our flight. (the way Jeff likes it!) The flight was uneventful. It was well after dark when we arrived to Cartagena, and even still, we were nearly stifled by heat and humidity upon steeping out of the plane! We took a short taxi ride to our new hostel, Mamallena,in the “old town” neighborhood of Getsemaní. It’s a party hostel, but luckily we are all the way at the back of the main patio away from the noise, and we have our own room and air conditioning and it was one of the cheaper hostels to stay in.
