Small Earthquake - no Brits injured

I’ve referred to Columbia all through these travel notes and now I’ve been reminded that it is spelt with an o not a u, so it isn’t Columbia Films or The District of, but the Republic of Colombia.

Leaving Medellin today we decide on a taxi.   Most taxis are small cars and when ours arrived there was a bit of head scratching.  Four of us with luggage for 6 weeks for us two and 2 months for Bonnie and Newt plus the biggest taxi driver I’ve ever seen.  Before we set off and rather worryingly for us he inspected the rear tyres in a somewhat concerned manner.    We were nearly introduced to a coach on the journey but arrived at the bus station (the Terminale des Transportes) safely only 5 minutes before our bus was due to leave.   As expected it left dead on time 35 minutes later.   The hotel had told us 6,000 pesos for the ride but all the taxis in Medellin have meters any way.  Halfway there I noticed that the meter wasn’t working and naturally pictured a bit of a scene.  So we all piled out, as usual never emptying a taxi while some of our luggage was on board and the driver said 5,000 pesos.   So that was all right then.  We’ve not had the slightest problem with any taxi driver in this country, where usually the meters are absent and we just ask the price first.  Similar length journeys always get a similar quote.

We head south into the coffee zone, running in the valley along the grain of the land and have great views of seriously rolling country.  It is very rucked, just like a blanket after a particularly poor night’s sleep and is very green.    Manizales is our next port of call which we had thought was a small town but it sprawls up both sides of a deep valley and has about 350,000 inhabs.   Most of the city is on one side of the valley and that part is bisected by the main road.  It’s a new first for us because to get into the main town on the top we have to take a cable car.  Two stops with just us and a nun and we’re at the top about a couple of thousand feet above the valley floor.

Deciding on the usual refreshments we stop at a coffee shop and after queueing for a coffee and the obligatory cake, we walk back outside to have Heather say, rather nonchalantly I thought, did you feel the earthquake ?   Well we didn’t and the post-earthquake wild panic consisted of one table of four ladies moving to another table further from the wall of the café

Rather like Medellin we’re not too impressed with the town but it does score points for being purely Colombian with no concession to tourism.  Virtually all the restaurants we see are local fast food joints and there are very few tourists.   A trip up the Cathedral tower is decided upon and it starts well with a civilised lift ride.  Then we’re out on the roof climbing stairs set alongside the big drop and then a walk along the peak of the roof to get to the tower.  These last two were completely in the open but did have railings quite like a cage over us.    Inside the tower we’re 50 metres up and a spiral staircase disappears upwards into the spire describing smaller and smaller circles as the walls close in on us.  I am really not enjoying this, and at 102 metres we squeeze through a small door onto a platform circling the tower where it’s about 15 feet across.   Not nice, not nice at all and it looks even worse from the street, just a platform seemingly stuck to the side of a sheer steep roof of slates (well 3 of us enjoyed it – H).   Back on terra firma and yes, the more firmer the less terror rings very true.   The big attraction in town is a monument to the founders of the city, one of the most stunning sets of statues I’ve ever seen.   Difficult to describe briefly but on a sloping site is a realistically cast family group battling against the elements while hauling oxen loaded with supplies behind them.   The figures are over life sized with a path through the middle so that one ox appears to be about to cross the path as you walk towards it.  It really is a quite stunning piece of work.     

Just to destroy my expectations the two bus rides to get to our next stop did take pretty well exactly the one hour each we were told.    The scenery is spectacularly rolling with misty tops as we approach Salento, another old colonial style town.   Much like many small Latin American towns it has a fairly scrubby central square with a few trees, a church and cafes.  Streets of one or two storey buildings on a grid pattern spread away from it and two or three blocks away is the bus station.   One or two streets contain most of the interest, hotels, shops and a tiny super (!) market or two.  The straight streets provide distant views of the hills that surround the town.  That’s Salento in a nutshell.   It is beautiful, as is the walk in the surrounding countryside.   We see the first motorhome since we got to Colombia so go for a closer look at this novelty, although it seems like time we should be home if that’s what constitutes a novelty.  Anyway it has French plates and turns out that the family, with two children of about 5 and 9 are on a two year trip.  They shipped the van across to the USA and have driven from there.  And some of you think we’re adventurous.

One more thing, my brother suggests that inhabitants of Bogota should be called Bogies but surely the residents of a small town we visited called Filandia must be Filanderers.