Part 4: Big city bits

Here’s a fun narrative device: beginning at the end.

(And by ‘end’ I mean the arbitrary cut-off for this particular entry. So let’s begin there. Just to get you hooked. Just to get you all hot and bothered.)

Our bus from Medellín to Guatape got pulled over by some stern looking police and on they pop with a dog. That’s a thing over here apparently. Sniff sniff goes the big Alsatian. The couple of big chaps are in well-fitting khaki uniform with orange embellishments and significant firearms. Gotta hand it to them all they looked spectacular; classy but firm. Some young Colombian with reddish eyes is hauled off and searched, and the dog disembarks to check out the big bags in the rear hold.

‘Gosh imagine if you actually had something on you right now you’d be shitting yourself’, I say to G. She looks at me sideways. Narco tourism is still rife — how many gringos get shafted by this sort of shakedown? Ha ha jovial stuff we’ll be on our way soon.

Hang on though. Yep that’s George’s backpack they’ve got. Ah yep ok step off the bus please. My crimson-cheeked, drug-trafficking junkie of a girlfriend follows the big handsome men and I stay right where I am, confused and concerned but already anticipating the rest of the trip on my tod. I'll make occasional calls to her rough & tumble Colombian cell to tell her all about the magnificent cuisines, cultures and excursions.

Here is how it unfolded:

They asked her in Spanish if she smokes marijuana. Puff puff hand gesture helps translate proceedings. George says no. Policeman stares intently at her eyes, dubious. She insists. Tells me afterwards that it is about this point that her nervous rash starts to prickle and broil. They unzip her bag. The dog’s still mighty interested, nuzzling itself all up in her dirty pants and that. Little jewellery box really excites them. Ah, nothing doing. As you were.

Now I guess my only comment other than this being a moderately uneasy 10 minutes or so would be: how is their focus marijuana? They’re aware, right?

Anyway, now we’re done with the end, let’s rewind.

As we head from Barichara to Villa de Leyva we pass Barbosa, both a prickly pirate and a frenzied dustbowl. Before long the labyrinthine medley of vehicles passes the baton to open roads; the cracked brick storefronts to unbelievable greenery and scenery. It’s like the Lake District made love to the Scottish Highlands. Naturally.

A family of six complete with a pram and a shabby few suitcases snake along the main road. I can’t help but wonder if they’re from Venezuela. The situation there is harrowing, and the mass-influx of those fleeing is increasingly evident during this stint of our trip. Medellín, especially, has a number of Venezuelan women in traditional dress and their young children lining some of the busier streets. They prepare necklaces and shake cups at passers by and later at night they curl up under thin blankets and somehow block out the commotions, bleeps and absurdities of modern commerce. Such scenes crack our hearts, and render any single complaint as entirely redundant.

Our impetuous visit to Villa de Leyva consisted of walking many times in and around its giant knobbly plaza. Biggest in Colombia I think. Quaint colonial buildings abound, balconied and abuzz with life. It’s quite commercial but retains a rustic charm, and you should definitely get yourself there if you’re a palaeontologist; plenty of my readership, without a shadow of a doubt. Heaps of the buildings are fronted by large fossils embedded in the walls. Neat.

One hoige cobblestone central plaza

We’re on the road again, bound for Bogotá, flicking past beer branded shacks of wood and corrugated iron, past faded signs luring locals for a brew, past young boys with holey sweaters leading cattle to some place with better grazing. These gorgeous, sweeping Andes. Honestly — just an absolute fuckload of stunning mountainside settlements. Pardon my French and forgive me my Spanish. Photos from the shakey bus are never golddust so you'll just have to believe me

This picture does not paint a thousand words so it's a good job I'm writing them

Bogotá is cold. Haven’t brought enough clothes to deal with the cold. Some other comments:

• Lively city to say the least.

• Traffic is a certified joke.

• Weekend energy comprises of beers at an Irish pub and a French girl in our dorm turning demonic in the night, pissing on the floor and proceeding to place her sodden trousers on my bed.

• We then both can’t sleep because of the smell of piss.

• Off to a flyer.

Though deliriously tired at intervals, we get heaps done. The gold museum features quite a lot of gold. The gist I got was that the region's ancient indigenous people were not only fine crafters and goldsmiths, but quite inclined towards spirituality. Plenty in there about shaman taking on the forms of bats and birds and frogs and shit. Loopy gold features result.

Botero museum has lots of fun artwork of fat people and things. Like classy Michelin Men at every turn. The guy is really rather revered in this country, and is perhaps the most famous Latin American artist on a global scale????? Is that true?????

Ha ha look at the doggo

We ate at Colombia’s oldest restaurant, La Puerta Falsa, and it was delicious. The soup had three types of potato in it, some tender chicken, sweetcorn, carrot. The broth was fragrant but not too salty, and ‘too salty’ is an accusation you could launch at quite a few delicacies in these parts. The tamale was also outstanding. For the uninitiated, a tamale (in Colombia, at least) is principally masa — mashed maize dough — with some sorta meat, tatties, and peas, all slow-cooked within a banana leaf wrap. Subtle yummy flavours, and very filling.

We have thus far declined another major regional delicacy — hot chocolate and cheese. Together. Yep. Went for breakfast with a fella we met at our hostel and he got one. You put the cheese in the choccie and wait for it to melt a bit before spooning it out and scranning it. The cheese did look a little bit like slightly soiled skin. Maybe we’ll give it a twirl soon. Maybe we won’t.

People seem to badmouth or pretty much bypass Bogotá, but we quite liked it. Did make the massive but unavoidable mistake of visiting Monserrate on a Sunday. It’s a very large hill on one side of the city which has fantastic views over the dizzying urban sprawl. It’s also home to a church, hence the very very Catholic Colombians are out in great number to get the funicular up, visit the spot and say their prayers. At the top is the first instance of a local family asking us for a photo. Being the Hollywood Q-listers we are, the proverbial blonde bombshells of height, clout and prowess, we appeased them and will now sit forever pretty on their mantelpiece.

Also, just look. This old leather handbag of a codger playing the cello encased by all these bright and beautiful colours was one of the sweetest things my dark, horrid heart has had to endure in a long time.

Time for a completely unrelated factoid:

Chicha is a fermented, low-alcohol drink that comes in vibrant colours and various flavours. This drink is banned but rife, pitched in plastic bottles by pretty much every bar of La Candelaria. It was banned like forty years ago because the government thought that all the lazies and the louts and the baddies were ropey off Chicha.

The La Candelaria area is a bit like Chicha in that it is colourful and lively. You feel compelled to place your hands in your pockets and on your valuables at intervals. There’s a souvenir hoof for sale in the market and seedy sex shops. There’s poverty, touts, tourists, and many and an underlying dirtiness, despite a certain bohemian appeal. This is an inadequate but space-efficient account of the 0.00005% of the city we covered.

After a few days we’re bound for Medellín, another big hitting city that bubbles away within a cauldron of spectacular Andean terrain. It’s hilly to get around but that’s good for the ol’ calves, and everyone knows that calves are the most important muscle in the human body.

A rare stretch of flat ground in Medellín

There’s quite an aesthetically pleasing spot called El Castillo — a French architecture inspired castle that’s now a museum surrounded by well-kempt gardens and agonising Instagram nonsense. We are made to join the Spanish tour, because there’s no English tour left, and there’s no way we can just walk around by ourselves because tourists can’t be trusted, but it takes all of 3 minutes for the guide to realise that containing us in this way is futile and agonising. Decent place. Had a world class library/writing room I could write erotic novels in for the rest of time. But only in Spanish.

There is so so so much to be said about Medellín and about Colombia in general. The recipe is rich and complex: you’ve got the dark recent past, continued misconceptions, natural wonder, inherently warm and welcoming people, development in abundance but also a lingering and deep-rooted scarcity. This is seemingly all captured in the city’s layers, and it’s all unveiled in 4K as you ride any of the cable cars up the mountainsides, over the favelas and across the communes that either have seen or still see some of the grizzliest scenes in Latin American life. During the 30 minute round trip on one such cable car, I note small fires growing and blowing in the midday heat, tatty flags fighting their own battles, and a young papa with his son on his shoulders shuffling down the narrow steps between stacked, shabby homes. It’s impossible to imagine. Corrugated iron sags on roofs of rough brick. Surplus bricks are used to hold the roofs in place. Young children fashion kites out of discarded plastic bags.

Comuna 13 is a mountainside settlement that now serves as a touristic oasis. It’s a sort of dark tourism — like a lot that captures the gringo’s attention in Colombia — on account of it formerly being the most deadly and violent neighbourhood in Latin America. Our tour guide lived there until he was 6, and tells us that he’d typically see corpses strewn on the street during his trip to school. Daily gunfire was an inevitable result of warring guerilla factions and cartels. The Comuna saw five major military operations to stabilise it, but even these are tinted by the taste of governmental cover-ups. Here’s a mad one: Guerilla groups laid claim to the Comuna cos it was a vital trade route for drugs; the government put a bounty on the head of guerillas in the area; the army, unregulated and nefarious, ransacked homes and pulled out innocent citizens, clothing them in fatigues to claim the pesos. There are mass graves of such citizens hidden in the mountains. Fascinating, horrifying day, but the area is now a burgeoning space for the urban arts, carried by street artists, dance troupes and rappers.

We, like so many tourists, stayed in Poblado, which is a hive of Western eateries and neon. There’s still an abundance of shifty characters, drug dealers and prostitutes lining Calle 10 and simmering around Parque Lleras, but that's cos the whole shabang is geared towards visitors spending money. One evening we eat some sensational bao buns and drink our way to a boogie at a local club. The booming sound of salsa and reggaeton serve us well until they don’t, and we walk past the seedy scenes to our sleepy hostel pods.

El Centro in Medellín is so busy as to be disconcerting. We head there for a few hours to check out some sights, but we rush through most of it on account of feeling slightly uneasy. The pace of life — flea markets, commuters, beggars, motos, etc. etc. — brings forth a sort of incessant vapour, casting over the whole scene a festival of smells and sounds that it’s tricky to dwell in for longer than necessary. A homeless fellow asks me for my lighter, so I hand it to him, waiting for him to light his cigarette and give it back, but he just stands there, staring, grinning. Righto. Later on I see him using it to smoke some delicious crack from his rusty little pipe on a bed of cardboard, so I feel quite bad about that from a facilitation point of view.

There’s an extraordinary chequered building — Rafael Uribe Palace of Culture — right next to the metro station (worth mentioning the public transport in Medellín is actually good, which is baffling) and a few cool plazas, including one that contains Botero’s ‘Birds of Peace’, another marker of the city’s harsh past. In 1995 a bomb was placed beneath the initial sculpture and blown to smithereens, killing 23. Botero decided to leave the dove’s husk there and provide another as its neighbour — something about resilience and empowerment and that.

The next day we take a Pablo Escobar tour. A lot of wanky blogs and half-baked internet prophets claim this is a bad thing to do, but we’re somewhat in the spirit of not rewriting history, and we’re sure to choose a provider that explores the grizzly truth rather than glorifying the deathly druglord. Honestly what a wrongun. Manipulative to the extreme, Escobar felt invincible on account of the ‘plata o plomo’ philosophy. Silver or lead. You either take the bribe or you die. His veiled gifts to Colombia’s poorest means he’s still a divisive figure here. The tour takes us to a memorial for several political and legal figures that he killed during the tyrannous reign of the Medellín cartel, complete with an account of hundreds of bombings in the 1980s. We then head up to the prison he built for himself, where he and his fellow prisoners hosted parties and lived it up, all with spectacular views over the valley. Then to the football pitch he built for the community. Then to his grave, where fresh flowers and kindly words adorn the stone. Our guide was well-informed and impartial. I’m glad we did it.

I guess the only way to effectively sign off this meaty metropolitan entry is not to mention once again Georgie’s near miss with the authorities, but to confirm that we’ve still not had an empanada that matches those on our first-full day on the road, back in San Jose. The search continues. As does our month in Colombia. But let’s go greenwards.