Medellín
A Sunday night, the end of the magic hour, sitting in back of the very creatively-named Hostal Medellín, a lovely evening breeze. It’s been a strange time. Still trying to get my bearings back, find my footing two days after the bad dream of Ibague. I suppose the eleven hours on a bus yesterday have something to do with it, and the fact that I’ve been in big big cities now for over a week.
Over this trip, perhaps due to my generally worn-down state, I have gravitated more and more towards small towns, nature, mountains, and away from cities. But here I am. Trying to decide if this one is the place I want to settle down in for awhile. It seems like every few hours my mood shifts from falling for this place to thinking I’ll leave the next day. I think I want to like it more than I actually do. But it’s worthy of staying a while.
Medellin is in so many ways unlike the rest of Colombian cities — comparatively it is much more modern, developed, well-kept. There are numerous parks, green space, public art all over the place, tall buildings, good vibes. There is a spotless Metro, nicer by far than any I’ve seen in Latin America. Probably nicer than any in the states, too. At the end of several of the Metro lines, there are modern cable cars that extend into the hillside barrios, included in the price of your ticket. It’s just clear that significant investments have been put into making this city livable. I’m not sure where they get the money for these public ventures, though perhaps it’s just a question of better and more efficient governance. There is a feeling of industriousness here, a little bit of focus and get-up-and-go.
It’s big, massive even, two and a half million inhabitants, and in some ways it feels bigger than Bogotá, which is three times as big. Because the majority of Bogotá is built on flat land, that city just disappears as it extends out into the distance. Medellin climbs up the mountainsides in every direction, so there is more city as far as you can see, tall buildings fading out of view, sinking into rows of tall buildings behind. While the constructions are not particularly attractive — mostly built from a dull red brick, the locale is lovely, green mountains surrounding the long, wide Aburrá valley. It is at a high enough altitude, ~5000 feet, that it’s cooler than it should be at this latitude, but at the same time it’s quite a bit warmer than the capital. They call this La Ciudad de la Primavera Eterna.
My feeling at present is that it’s a good enough place that I should give it a real shot, spend a week or thereabouts and try to dig below the surface level. I had the thought today that I should check on my ninety-day tourist visa, see how many days I have left. Went through the calendar, counted the days, and it turns out there are twelve remaining before I have to leave the country. And there’s a lot of it left to see. I entirely underestimated how long it would take me to get through Colombia. My initial response was that I should leave here tomorrow morning, but then I thought better of it and instead applied online for an extension of my tourist visa, ninety more days. Apparently it’s very easy to get, just a formality. Decided to wait and see what happens before I make any rash moves.
I woke up early in Ibague yesterday to the sounds of serious activity on the streets. What had been zombie land was now crowds of normal people coming and going, shops opening up from what looked like boarded-up buildings, the market buzzing and full. I went across the street for some chocolate caliente and my first buñuelos, these little round balls of fried dough made from yucca flour with sweet white cheese mixed in. I came back to my depressing hotel room to put my bags together, and was out the door and walking back down the hill to the bus terminal by eight o’clock.
My vision for the day: buy a ticket, wait for my bus, take a very doable five-hour ride, get the hell out of town. It was not to be. In the terminal, I asked the first counter guy I saw which companies have buses for Medellin. He looked concerned, didn’t really answer but went to talk to another guy walking by. This set in motion a bizarre series of incidents. The second guy asked someone else, and then said, ya se fue — it’s already gone — and told me to come with him. He didn’t explain anything, just motioned for me to follow him, out of the terminal, down the street and down a hill.
I tried to ask what we were doing, feeling very skeptical of help after my experiences the night before, and couldn’t get an answer I could understand. We stood at a corner at the bottom of the hill below the terminal, me and this guy from a bus company, apparently waiting for a bus. I asked if he was going to Medellin, too, and he said si. But soon, after talking to the other people waiting there and the driver from a passing bus, he decided we’d missed it, and told me vaminos! as he hailed a little taxi and got in. I tried to protest but he insisted that he’d pay for it. Feeling resigned to my fate, I went along, and we got onto the highway outside of town.
After awhile, piecing together patches of what he was telling the taxi driver, I figured out that I’d missed the morning bus, there wasn’t another until night, and we were pursuing that bus out of town, driving fast alongside a river. Bizarre. Fifteen minutes later, sure enough, we caught up with a ragged old red bus, the taxi driver honked and waved, and the bus pulled over. It turned out the bus company guy wasn’t going to Medellin, and he wasn’t paying for the taxi either. He’d done all this to help me, but now I had to pay a huge taxi fare, as much as my bus ticket from Bogotá, and get on a bus without a ticket and pay what seemed to me to be way too much for a five hour bus ride. It may have been because I was paying a gringo fare that went straight into the driver and money collector’s pockets, or maybe because the ride actually took eleven hours, and I was on that bus bumping around mountain roads until it was long since dark.
I don’t know how I’d gotten so out of my traveling groove. After seven months I’d grown fairly confident in my ability to figure things out, to communicate in Spanish, to avoid the bad parts. But in my twelve hours plus in Ibague I’d felt so out of sorts, vulnerable and confused. Entirely a fish out of water. I had all day to ponder this, looking out the windows as we dropped down into the Magdalena River valley, climbed back up again into the mountains, then crossed that river again. Came up with nothing, felt dispirited all day.
Not long after we crossed into the state of Antioquia, around dusk, we stopped at a little roadside restaurant in the mountains, and I had good rustic flavorful chorizo, maybe the best I’ve had in the country, served with arepas and papas rostado. I told the man that it was really good chorizo, and he said porque es antioqueña. It was the first I’d eaten since the buñuelos. Food helps.
I came into the large Terminal del Norte around 8:30 at night, exhausted. It felt more like an airport than a bus station, three levels, escalators, a mall inside. I hailed a taxi on the street, and he wanted too much money, double what my guidebook said, but I just wanted to get somewhere, and I got in. He took me to the Laureles neighborhood, which was supposed to be a good one, but the hostel he took me to was fully booked.
The girl who’d come to the door recommended another one a few blocks away, this one, which after extensive efforts we located, and mercifully, they had a bed. I dropped my bags and walked out of the quiet residential blocks to the main street, Carrera Setenta, which looked to be quite the strip with restaurants and bars and clubs. I realized out there that it was a Saturday night, and people were out dressed in tight shiny clothes, spending money, having fun. I felt so far away from Saturday night. All I wanted was a beer to help me wind down, and I found a little store and bought a couple Club Colombia Rojas.
Back at the hostel, lo and behold, the TV in the living room was playing the Golden State Warriors vs. Oklahoma City Thunder. A couple Japanese guys were watching. It appears other people like NBA basketball. I could just sink into the couch, nurse my beer and escape into this basketball game. The Dubs were in fine form, and won by thirty points.
Today life got quite a bit better. The first thing to do, to establish some kind of normalcy and groundedness after my detour in Ibague, was to buy some food and cook a proper breakfast. I walked up quiet Sunday morning streets past Setenta to Avenida San Juan, the biggest in the area, where I found an Éxito supermarket. Lots of cans and boxes and lifeless produce, but amidst all this I scavenged a few modest treasures: some chard and mushrooms and a small block of cheese. Paid too much for a queso holandés, a bland version of gouda I suppose. At the corner bodega close to my hostel, I bought some eggs and bread, and cooked it all up into a salty sauteed mess of comfort.
A bit after, I was sitting in this same courtyard, hiding from a fierce sun, and got to talking to some hostelmates. Before I knew quite what had happened, I had pledged myself on a long afternoon walk with a friendly young French woman named Victoire. Within half an hour, we were walking on the other side of Avenida San Juan, into Laureles where all the streets are curved and every four blocks or so there is a nice green park or a little round plaza. This is the way I have learned to explore a Latin American city: from plaza to plaza.
Victoire is dark-haired, pretty with a decisive look in her eye, early on in her travels, curious and enthusiastic. I liked her right away. She couldn’t really relate to my travel fatigue, this being her first month, so there was no point in talking about it, just being where we were, looking at Medellin with her, trying to imagine living here. Sometime in the recent past she had finished university, then worked for awhile and got tired of it. So many travelers come out of this situation, and are trying to figure out what do next in their life from the vantage point of a faraway part of the world. I was once there myself, when at twenty four I left my office job and spent six months wandering around Mexico. Didn’t come close to figuring out my life. The difference is that this time I have no plans to go back anytime soon.
Somewhere in the midst of Laureles it began to rain, and we walked for awhile with rain jackets on, but it didn’t seem to want to let up. At a larger plaza with a stone church, we decided it would be sensible to find somewhere to wait it out. The best option was a little storefront tienda doubling as a cafe with a few iron and glass tables, where a couple old men were sitting over little cups of tinto (which is black coffee here) and the music was not reggaeton. I got a hot chocolate and she got a coffee and it was good to get out of the weather.
It occurred to me that I had a deck of cards in my bag, and I wanted to teach her cribbage but it seemed like too many rules and too long a game for the setting. So we ended up with some variant of gin rummy, and we drank our sweet hot drinks and played a game where it didn’t matter who won but rather just the ceremony of picking up cards and putting others down. I was struck by the spontaneous nature of traveling, where if someone had told me the day before that I’d be playing rummy with a girl named Victoire in this storefront during a rain, it would have seemed completely surreal. My hot chocolate was good enough that I got a second one, and the rain let up enough for me to go stand under the awning and smoke, but then it came on hard again. Nothing to do but keep playing cards, a third game, and I didn’t mind a bit. Where did I need to be?
Eventually the day found its equilibrium with an exceedingly light drizzle, and we put our rain jackets back on and decided to carry on with our walk despite all of it. Across Avenida 33 and into a semi-industrial area of overpasses and warehouses and weedy vacant lots, until we saw our destination, the little green hill big enough to have a name, Cerro Nutibara. But we couldn’t figure out how exactly to get to it, lost between Calles 32F and 32b, all the streets seeming to dead end or T out. We kept walking south until we came to a street that actually led to the park, and then we were climbing cement stairs almost straight up the side of a steep hill. Every so long, they would curve and then head straight up again. Counting the steps as I went, a trick I’ve learned to keep your mind off the climb and your lungs and the lack of oxygen in them. 541 steps up it leveled off to a little road, and it wasn’t raining anymore at all.
At the top of this wooded park that feels like it’s in the middle of nowhere there is this attraction called Pueblito Paisa, with lots of people there, mostly Colombian tourists. A miniature town, a freshly-painted vision of a turn-of-the-20th-century idyllic plaza in an imaginary Antioquia. White washed walls and red and yellow and blue balconies under terra cotta roofs. Kind of a Disney Colombia. We weren’t buying any souvenirs from the vendors, the restaurants looked pricey, and it wasn’t the kind of place you just sat around. Not like a real plaza. There was a museum, too, the City Museum, but we didn’t even consider going in, just walked past to the mirador, the platform where you can look out over most of the valley. The clouds were lifting and sun emerging over the mountains opposite. The city of red brick buildings was charming with all of its green trees and mountains, but also strangely not real, and we ate some mandarinas that I had in my bag and that was that. Medellín was lovely but it also didn’t feel like home.
It was time to walk back down all those steps again, no counting this time, both of us getting a little tired in the late afternoon humidity. We crossed a bridge over the channelized Rio Medellin with its cement banks, and found the Industriales Metro station, clean and spacious. Caught a sleepy ride on a very modern train up four stops to San Antonio, and then switched to the other line and got off at Estadio. When Victoire and I said goodbye at the hostel it was dusk outside and clear to me that I might not ever hang out with her again. I certainly wouldn’t mind, but she’s going out tonight, dancing with some kids from the hostel, which I have neither budget nor energy for, and tomorrow morning on some day trip and by tomorrow night, I might well be gone somewhere.
✦✦
It is two days later and I am indeed gone somewhere, but not very far. I am staying at a different hostel in a different neighborhood in Medellín. The Yellow House Hostel in Floresta one Metro stop to the west, a more relaxed place with less people coming and going and partying at night. In fact I think there are three guests here in total. I’ve been feeling aimless, finding it difficult to motivate to go out into the city but enjoying myself well enough when I do. I don’t know if it’s just because I’m tired, worn down, or because I don’t have the energy to deal with figuring out a big city, but I find I mostly want to just sit in the grassy backyard of the hostel and read my book under an umbrella.
Tonight I went to a dance performance called Cicatrices y Sueños — Scars and Dreams — at the Teatro Tobon near the center, and it was great to be there in the midst of university students and cultured people who go see dance performances. The show blended traditional and modern dance with folktales that came off as hard to follow. Maybe it would be different if you previously knew the folktales but it was striking just to watch them move passionately in bright-colored flowing costumes and listen to live music, a band with classical guitar and bass, hand percussion and flute, male and female singers. It all felt very South American. Don’t even know the last time I’ve seen performance that was not in any way meant for tourists.
This city is a major stopping point on the gringo trail, but it has more than enough of a life of its own that they don’t have a big impact here. At least not in the neighborhoods I’ve been in, having avoided El Poblado, the party area that is full of hostels. Got a good meal at the cafe in the theater lobby, a legit pasta a la carbonara, and it felt like the most sophisticated place I’d been in a long time. Sitting in the theater, I decided that tomorrow I was going to start applying to schools in the city.
On the way back, passing the Casino Havana a block up from the Metro station for about the fifth time, I couldn’t help myself and went in, and they actually had blackjack tables with dealers. The first time I’d seen them in the country. I was feeling good and sat down at a table with a cute young female dealer and bought in for fifty thousand pesos, which sounds like a lot but is about seventeen dollars. Which to be fair is more than half of my daily budget. Gambling when you can’t afford to lose is rarely fruitful. One of the things I’ve learned about wagering is that being attached to the money you’re betting doesn’t help you make good choices. Either way the gods of luck were not on my side, and my chips were gone in half an hour. The girl didn’t seem to care a bit, gave me a smirky smile of pity as I got up, kicking myself for wasting my dwindling moneys.
When I got back to the hostel, I checked my email for the first time since early afternoon, and the bad luck seemed to be compounding. I had a message from Migración Colombia with the subject: Trámite de Prórroga en línea-Rechazo. I didn’t know the word rechazo, but I figured it had to do with rechazar, which means rejection. I scanned the thing quickly, and there in bold and all caps it said NO FUE APROBADA and then below it, RECUERDE QUE SU ESTADÍA EN COLOMBIA ES HASTA EL 10/03/2018. No reasons provided, just that my request to extend my visa was not approved, and a friendly reminder that I needed to leave the country in ten days. It was supposed to be easy to get an extension. The only thing that makes sense to me is that my country is very likely not being generous with tourist visas for Colombians, so they would do the same to Americans.
My consciousness shifts toward the border with Ecuador, where I need to be in ten days. Half a country away — a big country. About seven hundred and fifty miles south. For perspective, that’s about as far as I’ve made in eleven weeks. At some level I’d decided I was just going to stay in Colombia indefinitely, and this came as a shock to my non-real current sense of reality.
There is a lot of this country left to see, and I am going to have to make some hard choices. The first was to leave tomorrow morning. The second is to make my first stop in the little town of Jardin up in the mountains a half days ride south of here. Anna, my Russian-Norwegian friend from La Pacha is staying there. Maybe I won’t even find her. Sent her a message a while ago but sometimes she doesn’t check her email for days. From there I’ll decide what’s next. On my list in this country still after Jardin: Manizales, El Desierto de la Tatacoa, San Agustin, Tierradentro, Popoyan, Putomayo, maybe Cali. These will have to be seriously abbreviated. It is time to get moving.
