Medellin

From Manizales we headed through to Medellin enduring another twisty turny bus trip that took a lot longer than the distance would imply. We had been told there was good food, coffee and shopping in Medellin and we were looking forward to this. Our hotel was very central and made it easy to get to the places we wanted.

Our first day, we were taken on a city tour by Andreas, a local who had spent years working on cruise ships and being part of tours in other places and then realised he could do it better at home. Starting up Cerro Nutibara gave a great overview of the city and hinted at how active the residents were with many running, walking and cycling up the hill. At the top they had a museum, that we used as the viewing platform, and Pueblito Paisa, a replica coffee town, to wander through. It was an easy place for Andreas to point out different neighbourhoods and explain how the city works.

Driving around Medellin was chaotic and Andreas preferred to keep the windows closed incase someone took a liking to our cameras and would try to grab them through the window while going passed on a motorbike. He appeared to be more concerned about this than we were as we actually quite felt safe here, but this may have been naively. Medellin is much safer now than some years back and there are reminders of the violent times with Botero unwilling to repair one of his sculptures that had been blown up, killing innocent public and no one even claiming it, as a reminder and memorial to those times.

Plaza Botero is fantastic to wander through surrounded by all manner of people and animals depicted in Botero’s voluminous style. They had a great feeling about them and could only make you smile. Beside here was the typewriter alley where people would come to get letters etc written up. They ranged from the old school mechanical, through the electric and one fancy guy even had a computer.

We caught the metro to one of the gondola stations to head up to Santo Domingo Sabio, not to walk around, just for a view over the poorer neighbourhoods and back towards the city. Andreas explained how the building of the gondolas not only helped the people living here to more easily get into work and school, but they also built community areas for the residents to play sport or relax and there has also been a decrease the crime rate.

As we returned back towards town we stopped in at the botanical gardens with the amazing orchid house and lagoons to watch iguanas swimming and even climbing trees. It is very close to Parque de los Deseos which plays films on the wall of the planetarium for free some evenings.

The nice thing about this tour was Andreas could drop us anywhere at the end, we opted for the highly recommended Pergamino, not far from our hotel. Everyone we spoke to, in New Zealand and Colombia, recommended Pergamino as having the best coffee in Medellin and it completely lived up to the high expectations we had formed. We were hanging out for good coffee and we at last found it. The food was pretty good too, so we were certainly in our happy place.

Medellin, for us, was all about food and shopping and we found some great versions of both. There were many cute wee designer stores around the El Poblado area and the massive Santa Fe shopping mall, a good place to get some generic things, was a nice walk down the main avenue. We had many recommendations for food, some lived up to the hype, some didn’t. Carmen restaurant exceeded our expectations, starting with their amazing cocktails and following with the interesting fusion flavours of the entrees and mains. We were tempted to go there a second night, but knew we should try somewhere different and also that there was a Carmen restaurant in Cartagena that we may want to go to. It may have been better to have gone to Carmen a second night, but unfortunately we went to the other highly recommended restaurant, Mondongos. Here was supposed to be a great place for local Colombian food and maybe, if we hadn’t been such whimps, and actually tried the mondongo (tripe), it would have lived up to expectations, but the dishes we had certainly didn’t.

Here was another city that closed some of their avenues on Sunday for the ciclovia, this was much smaller than in Bogota, but many people were making use of it. It also lead to a small market in Parque La Presidenta where we were enthralled by some sugar cane and lime drink being made. Medellin appeared to be a very active city and this was reinforced as we drove out to the airport surrounded by cyclists climbing what seemed to be a never ending hill, we wondered if it was a random once off, but the permanent road markings indicated otherwise. We were beginning to made feel very lazy, but hey, we’re on vacation.